General Editors: Helen Jaskoski and Robert M. Nelson
Poetry/Fiction: Joseph W. Bruchac III
Bibliographer: Jack W. Marken
Editor Emeritus: Karl Kroeber
Assistant to the Editor: Lynn Poncin
SAIL - Studies in American Indian Literatures is the only scholarly
journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian
literatures. The journal publishes reviews, interviews, bibliographies,
creative work including transcriptions of performances, and scholarly
and theoretical articles on any aspect of American Indian literature
including traditional oral material in dual-language format or translation, written works, and live and media performances of verbal art.
SAIL is published quarterly. Individual subscription rates for Volume 3
(1991) are $12 domestic and $16 foreign; institutional rates are $16
domestic and $20 foreign. All payments must be in U.S. dollars. Limited
quantities of volume 1 (1989) are available to individuals at $16 the
volume and to institutions at $24 the volume.
Manuscripts should follow MLA format; please submit three copies with
SASE to
Helen Jaskoski
SAIL
Department of English
California State University Fullerton
Fullerton, California 92634
Creative work should be addressed to
Joseph Bruchac, Poetry/Fiction Editor
The Greenfield Review Press
2 Middle Grove Avenue
Greenfield Center, New York 12833
For advertising and subscription information please write to
Elizabeth H. McDade
Box 112
University of Richmond, Virginia 23173
Copyright SAIL. After first printing in SAIL copyright reverts to the
author.
ISSN: 0730-3238
1991 Patrons:
Cincinnati College of the University of Cincinnati
English Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison
Production of this issue supported by the University of Richmond.
SAIL
Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2
Volume 3, Number 3
Fall 1991
CONTENTS
"IDENTITY" AND "DIFFERENCE" IN THE TRANSLATION OF
NATIVE AMERICAN ORAL LITERATURES: A ZUNI CASE
STUDY
William M. Clements
.
.
.
.
. 1
NOBODY IS AN ORPHAN: Interview with Luci Tapahonso
Sylvie Moulin .
.
.
.
.
. 14
THREE VIEWS OF POWWOW HIGHWAY
Easin’ on Down the Powwow Highway(s)
Rodney Simard .
.
.
.
.
. 19
Culture Isn’t Buckskin Shoes: A Conversation Around Powwow
Highway
Toby Langen and Kathryn Shanley
.
.
. 23
Powwow Highway in an Ethnic Film and Literature Course
Carol Gerster and Marshall Toman
.
.
. 29
COMMENTARY
From the Secretary-Treasurer
.
From the Editors
.
.
1992 Continued
.
.
Call for Creative Work
.
Update on "Returning the Gift"
Opportunity for Benefactors
.
Invitation to Reviewers
.
Directory of American Indian Writers
AICA Tour
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
39
39
40
42
42
43
43
44
44
REVIEWS
American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review,
and Selected Bibliography. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
James W. Parins
.
.
.
.
. 45
Wolverine Myths and Visions: Dene Traditions from Northern Alberta.
Comp. Dene Wodih Society
H. C. Wolfart
.
.
.
.
.
. 46
ii
California Indian Nights. Comp. Edward W. Gifford and Gwendoline
Harris Block
Greg Sarris
.
.
.
.
.
. 52
Bighorse the Warrior. Tiana Bighorse. Ed. Noël Bennett
Hertha D. Wong
.
.
.
.
. 56
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold. Charles A. Eastman
(Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale Eastman
Julian Rice
.
.
.
.
.
. 59
Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary
Northwest Native American Poetry. Ed. Andrea Lerner
Jarold Ramsey
.
.
.
.
. 62
The Indian Lawyer. James Welch
Sidner Larson
.
.
.
.
. 64
In Mad Love and War. Joy Harjo
Carter Revard
.
.
.
.
. 66
The Invisible Musician. Ray A. Young Bear
Robert F. Gish
.
.
.
.
. 69
Medicine River. Thomas King
Rodney Simard
.
.
.
. 72
.
Chasers of the Sun: Creek Indian Thoughts. Louis Littlecoon Oliver
Ron Welburn
.
.
.
.
. 75
Simple Songs. Vickie Sears
Rhoda Carroll
.
.
.
.
. 76
A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography of Chief G. W.
Grayson. Ed. W. David Baird
Robert F. Sayre
.
.
.
.
.
80
Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present.
Ed. Penny Petrone
Agnes Grant
.
.
.
.
.
. 83
Paula Gunn Allen. Elizabeth I. Hanson
Birgit Hans
.
.
.
.
.
. 86
Briefly Noted
.
.
.
.
.
. 88
CONTRIBUTORS .
.
.
.
.
. 91
iii
"IDENTITY" AND "DIFFERENCE" IN THE TRANSLATION
OF NATIVE AMERICAN ORAL LITERATURES:
A ZUNI CASE STUDY
William M. Clements
Transformations of Native American oral literary performances into
European-language texts have tended to reflect the translators’
preconceptions about "the Indian" and about literature. For example,
early nineteenth-century textmakers such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
and his contemporaries perceived in Native American oratory,
narrative, and song the raw materials for "real" literature. Consequently, they focused their translation efforts on the imagery from nature,
figurative tropes, and patterns of rhythm which they believed inherent
in Indian literary expression, embellishing and codifying these "very
decided beginnings of a literature"—in William Gilmore Simms’s
phrase (137)—in whatever ways were necessary to produce texts that
met the Euramerican literary conventions of their day (Clements).
These translators’ successors, the "scientists" of the Bureau of
American Ethnology and of Boasian anthropology, also operated with
preconceptions about Native American oral literature; they emphasized
its documentary function, its role as a source of data about language
usage and other aspects of culture (Powell, "Report" xx; Boas 393).
Hence, their textualizations stressed the importance of accurate
preservation of Native-language originals, even their so-called "free
translations" highlighting semantic correspondences and ignoring, for
the most part, indigenous esthetic features. Early in the twentieth
century, enthusiasts for Native Americana such as Natalie Curtis and
Mary Austin imposed still another preconception on their translations
and interpretations especially of American Indian oral poetry (that is,
songs without music): the idea that this poetry represented the primitive
phase in the evolution of true literature and that a genuine American
literature must base itself on aboriginal strivings at verbal artistry in the
New World (Castro). Their translations portrayed Indians as primitive
Imagists, whose art anticipated modern trends in literature.
During the three and a half centuries that Euramericans have been
translating Native North American oral literature, many preconceptions
have colored their work. While a careful examination of each set of
preconceptions must precede full appreciation of available translations,
a sense of their general tendencies can emerge from Fredric Jameson’s
dichotomy between "Identity" and "Difference" (43-45). The "peculiar,
unavoidable, yet seemingly unresolvable alternation" between the poles
of this dichotomy poses a dilemma whenever we confront alien cultural
products, according to Jameson. If we perceive in these products that
with which we can identify—that which is accessible through "our own
cultural moyens du bord"—we may overlook or minimize their
otherness through what may become "little better than mere psychologi-
cal projection." But if we focus on the alien cultural products’
Difference, we cut short hopes of comprehension and appreciation (43).
Jameson exemplifies the alternation between Identity and Difference
by surveying responses to classical culture. Invoking the principle of
Identity, we have found in the symmetrical formality of Greek
classicism parallels not only to our own esthetic values but also to our
sociopolitical ideals. Yet when a recognition of the oversimplification
inherent in this view prompts a turn to the principle of Difference, a
perception of the Greece of antiquity as "a culture of masks and death,
ritual ecstasies, slavery, scapegoating, [and] phallocratic homosexuality" emerges which is just as conditioned as the earlier perspective
(44). Jameson’s point is not that we should attempt to resolve conflicting views engendered by the Identity–Difference dichotomy, but that
we should be aware of these principles as mediators between us and
alien cultures.
Arnold Krupat has introduced Jameson’s ideas into the discourse on
Native American oral literature in a review of Karl Kroeber’s Traditional Literatures of the American Indian. In terms of the ongoing
Native American–Euramerican encounter, Krupat notes, Identity and
Difference reflect the poles of response which contact with Indians has
produced in Euramericans. For the Puritans, Native Americans,
subhuman denizens of "howling wilderness," epitomized Difference,
since they were leagued with Satan in opposing the kingdom of God in
New England. The eighteenth century also stressed ways in which
Indians embodied Difference and placed investigations of their history,
philology, and ethnology under the rubric of natural philosophy. On the
other hand, the romantics’ idealization of the Noble Savage generated
a perception of Native Americans in terms of Identity, as some
Euramericans saw in the Indian what they would themselves be without
the trappings of civilization (4).
Extended to translations of Native American oral literature, the
principle of Identity has meant that textmakers have assumed they could
translate orations, narratives, and poems in ways that would make them
readily accessible to Euramerican readers—that adding rhyme and
regularized meter to poetry or presenting oral narrative as paragraphed
prose, for example, legitimately represented Indian oral literature.
Exponents of the Identity principle might cite Susan Hegeman’s timely
reminder, "If one did not acknowledge Anglo-American textual
conventions to some extent, then there would be no translation" (20).
Yet while the translation enterprise must at least acknowledge the
principle of Identity, textmakers who recognize the alternative,
Difference, have emphasized the dangers of using literary conventions
of one culture to represent the true verbal artistry of another and of
transforming the oral text into the written. For them, Difference
2
manifests itself in two ways: linguistic/cultural and semiotic—in the
materials’ languages and cultural matrices and in their media of
expression. Adherents of the Difference principle would probably agree
with Irving Goldman’s caveat about textualization of Kwakiutl cultural
expression: "As a matter of simple caution, we should assume that if
the mode of thought of primitive peoples, as revealed by the ethnographic records, sounds all too familiar notes of recognition in the
western academic mind, something is seriously wrong with the
rendition" (334).
The Identity-Difference dichotomy offers an approach to making
sense of the textualization, translation, interpretation, and critical
understanding of Native American oral literature. A reader can evaluate
the "authenticity" of a particular piece in terms of its translator’s choice
of one principle or other. Furthermore, the dichotomy provides a useful
basis for comparing and contrasting translated texts, especially those
representing the same Native literary heritage. This latter function may
be sampled effectively by examining work done with the oral literature
of Zuni, a pueblo in western New Mexico.
Since Frank Hamilton Cushing’s residence of four and a half years
beginning in 1879, Zuni has continued to attract anthropologists. James
Stevenson, leader of the Smithsonian expedition of which Cushing was
a member, also studied the community’s culture. His wife, Matilda
Coxe Stevenson, involved in the research from its beginning, continued
the work after her husband’s death in 1888. Elsie Clews Parsons spent
considerable time at Zuni between 1915 and 1930, A. L. Kroeber
visited the pueblo during the summers of 1915 and 1916, Leslie Spier
did archeological research nearby in 1916, Frederick Webb Hodge
returned to Zuni periodically for almost forty years between 1886 and
1923, and Franz Boas was there briefly in 1920. Ruth Benedict and
Ruth Bunzel came to Zuni in 1924, the latter returning for several
subsequent summers. More recently, Omer C. Steward, John Adair,
Stanley Diamond, Dennis Tedlock, and M. Jane Young among others
have done anthropological fieldwork at Zuni (Pandey). While most of
these researchers paid some attention to oral literature, many of them
producing translations, three stand out as representing the principles of
Difference and Identity particularly well. At one extreme, Cushing’s
work reflects Identity, since his comments about Zuni oral literature
and his translations suggest a belief that the material could legitimately
be rendered according to Euramerican literary conventions. Bunzel, on
the other hand, recognized the principle of Difference when she
commented on her translation efforts. But her actual translations reflect
Identity more than Difference. Tedlock has worked more consistently
from Difference, since he has stressed not only the linguistic and
cultural gap between Zuni and English, but also the distinction between
3
orally performed literature and literature crafted within a tradition of
writing.
Cushing published two major collections of translations from Zuni
oral literature. "Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths," brief cosmogonic
and etiological narratives, appeared in 1896 in the Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE). Zuñi Folk Tales, longer
examples of what John Wesley Powell called "discredited mythology"
("Introduction" viii), came out posthumously in 1901. Though
Cushing’s published comments about his methods of translation are
scanty, they reveal his acceptance of the principle of Identity. For
example, in the introduction to "Outlines" he writes of the songs which
appear in some of the myth texts: "In the originals these are almost
always in faultless blank meter. . . . I do not hesitate . . . to tax to the
uttermost my power of expression in rendering the meanings of them
where I quote, clear and effective and in intelligible English" (374).
Cushing found Zuni songs so like poetry in English that he could apply
a generic term from the latter ("blank verse") to them. Moreover, he had
no qualms about waxing literary in a Euramerican mode when
translating them. Powell’s introduction to the folktale collection
includes some telling comments about Cushing’s "scriptorial wand,"
which the translator waved to make Zuni oral narratives "a part of the
living literature of the world." Cushing was especially equipped to
accomplish this since he could "think as myth-makers think, . . . speak
as prophets speak, . . . [and] expound as priests expound" (ix). In other
words, Cushing recognized Identity between what he might express in
English literary prose and what the Zuni verbalized in oral narration.
Cushing’s devotion to the principle of Identity probably arose from
two sources. The first was his deeply personal involvement in Zuni
culture. While some may dismiss such antics as his signing correspondence as "First War-Chief of Zuni" (Woodward) and being photographed in Zuni dress as manifestations of Cushing’s idiosyncratic
personality, they do reveal his sense that the Zuni and he—a "civilized"
Euramerican—were not all that different, even though at disparate
stages in the scheme of cultural evolution which he espoused. This
scheme, a second source of the Identity principle for Cushing, enjoyed
the support of most anthropologists of the late nineteenth century.
Proposed by Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan and
field-tested by Powell’s BAE, it posited human psychic unity (read
"Identity") and the notion that cultural forms at various evolutionary
stages had genetic connections that presupposed at least traces of
Identity. Fieldworkers such as Cushing might see cross-cultural
equivalences, even when they were lacking, because of the force of
evolutionary theory—hence, Tedlock’s criticism that Cushing’s "metaphysical glossing" of his texts stressed a monotheism indicative of "the
4
theoretical preconceptions of nineteenth-century anthropology rather
than Zuni belief" ("On the Translation" 58).
Cushing’s opinion that Zuni oral narrative resembled Victorian
prose closely enough to warrant his use of the contemporary Euramerican esthetic colors his renderings of the Zuni material. For example,
consider how he handles a description of the twin war gods in a myth
text to which he assigned the title "The Origin of the Twin Gods of
War and of the Priesthood of the Bow":
Lo! dwarfed and hideous-disguised were the two gods
Áhaiyuta and Mátsailema, erst Uanamachi Píahkoa or the
Beloved Twain who Descended—strong now with the full
strength of evil; and armed as warriors of old, with long
bows and black stone-tipped arrows of cane-wood in quivers
of long-tailed skins of catamounts; whizzing slings, and
death-singing slung-stones in fiber-pockets; spears with dart
dealing fling-slats, and blood-drinking broad-knives of gray
stone in fore-pouches of fur-skin; short face-pulping
war-clubs stuck aslant in their girdles, and on their backs
targets of cotton close plaited with yucca. Yea, and on their
trunks, were casings of scorched rawhide, horn-like in
hardness, and on their heads wore they helmets of strength
like to the thick neck-hide of male elks, whereof they were
fashioned. ("Outlines" 422)
The initial interjection and reversal of word order suggest an attempt
to be "literary" according to Victorian standards. The interminable
length of the first sentence, though perhaps reflecting the formulaic
quality of oral poetry (which most contemporaray translators consider
Native American oral narrative to be [e.g., Hymes]), more likely draws
upon European epic literature which Cushing could have known in a
variety of Victorian translations. Cushing also adopts a stilted formality
in vocabulary, which, though it could be an attempt to reproduce the
mythopoeic diction of Zuni narrators, probably derives from the fad for
conscious archaizing that characterized Victorian literature set in the
past (Basnett-McGuire 72–73).
Cushing translated poetic passages in myths into Victorian verse.
For example, he treated the words of one of the "Ancients" summoned
to assist the war gods in their maturation as follows:
"Why call ye, small worms of the waters
And spawn of the earth and four quarters,
Ye disturbers of thought, lacking shame;
Why call ye the words of my name?" ("Outlines" 421)
5
The use of rhyme introduces a feature of English poetics absent from
Zuni. Bunzel, in fact, chided Cushing for this "inexplicable blunder"
of rendering Zuni poetry in "regular short-lined rhymed English
stanzas" ("Zuñi Ritual Poetry" 620).
Cushing’s treatment of the final paragraphs of a folktale he entitled
"The Maiden and the Sun" offers another example of his approach to
translation:
And ever since then [the events of the story], my children,
the world has been filled with anger, and even brothers
agree, then disagree, strike one another, and spill their own
blood in foolish anger.
Perhaps had men been more grateful and wiser, the
Sun-father had smiled and dropped everywhere the treasures
we long for, and not hidden them deep in the earth and
buried them in the shores of the sea. And perhaps, moreover, all men would have smiled upon one another and
never enlarged their voices nor strengthened their arms in
anger toward one another. (Zuñi Folk Tales 474)
This lengthy summary and explicit, garrulous statement of the story’s
moral exemplify what Tedlock regards as the "most serious difficulty"
with Cushing’s folktale translations: his embroidery of the originals
"with devices, lines, and even whole passages which are clearly of his
own invention and not mere distortions" ("On the Translation" 59). As
Brian W. Dippie has noted, Cushing was "more adept at conveying a
feeling for myth" than at recording it with exactitude (285), but his
sense of the essential Identity between the Zuni and himself and
between their literature and his granted him the license to cast Zuni oral
literature in a Victorian mode. Unlike some translators who transform
what they perceive as exotic, esthetically remote literature according to
the esthetic conventions of the target language in order to create texts
with reader accessibility, Cushing did not regard Zuni oral literature as
remote. He converted it into Victorian prose and poetry because he
sensed its Identity with them.
Ruth Bunzel, trained by Franz Boas and initiated into fieldwork by
Ruth Benedict, had no use for the cultural evolutionism of Cushing’s
generation of anthropologists. Instead, she accepted her mentors’
doctrines of cultural diversity and cultural relativism—in other words,
of Difference and respect for Difference. Unlike Cushing she recognized the obstacles in translating from Zuni into English, but like him
she often chose vocabulary and stylistic constructions for her texts that
made them immediately accessible to readers of English, thus representing them in terms of Identity. The major collections of Bunzel’s
translations are "Zuñi Origin Myths" and "Zuñi Ritual Poetry," both of
which appeared in 1932 in the BAE Annual Report, and Zuñi Texts,
6
published in 1933 by the American Ethnological Society.
"Zuñi Ritual Poetry" contains most of Bunzel’s commentary on her
translation procedures. While Cushing was confident that Zuni and
English evinced the principle of Identity to such an extent that he could
easily translate from one to the other, Bunzel noticed some very real
difficulties. In vocabulary, for instance, she cited problems produced
by the "obsolete or special" language used in ritual texts (620) and the
abundant word play in those texts (619). The latter included double
entendres and deliberate verbal and grammatical ambiguity, but even
ascertaining "how much is word play, how much metaphor, and how
much is actual personification" sometimes mystified her (619). Bunzel
also identified grammatical differences between English and Zuni, the
Native American language’s reliance on inflection being most significant.
Other grammatical features of Zuni which caused translation
problems for Bunzel included its use of long periodic sentences, its
typical word order (subject, object, verb), and its use of participial or
gerundive clauses to express temporal or causal subordination ("impossible in English," she lamented) (618-19). She regretted her inability
to carry these aspects of Zuni grammar over into English and the
resulting loss of "effective stylistic feature[s]" (619). Bunzel was also
unable to retain the rhythm of Zuni ritual poetry in her English texts
(though she could preserve "its irregularity, the unsymmetrical
alteration of long and short lines" [620]). Finally, she believed her
translations suffered "greatly from loss of sonority and vigor" because
of her inability to transfer Zuni patterns of accent into English (620).
Clearly, then, Bunzel recognized the principle of Difference, but she
did not represent it fully in her translations. Perhaps she believed that
doing so would have rendered her texts inaccessible to English readers
and, like many other translators, opted to sacrifice features of the
source language original for the sake of target language readability
(Basnett-McGuire 23).
Whatever the reasons, Ruth Bunzel created poetic texts that
read—by her own admission—more like the blank verse of Milton or
the free verse of the King James translation of the Psalms than Zuni
oral poetry ("Zuñi Ritual Poetry" 620). Notice her treatment of the
ending of one of the prayers of the War Cult:
On roads reaching to Dawn Lake
May you grow old;
May your roads be fulfilled;
May you be blessed with life.
Where the life-giving road of your sun father comes out,
May your roads reach;
May your roads be fulfilled. ("Zuñi Ritual Poetry" 689)
7
Aside from the reference to "Dawn Lake," nothing in these lines
suggests that they originated in the oral literature of a culture as
removed from that of most readers of English as the Zuni. In fact, their
stately measure and litany-like parallelism fulfill expectations, shaped
by Judaeo-Christian scripture and liturgy, of what ritual poetry should
be. Bunzel has not added these features; they exist to some degree in
the Zuni text published alongside her translation. But she has not
translated that text in a way that suggests the Difference her commentary recognizes.
Bunzel’s translations of Zuni oral narrative assume the same
approach. The first paragraph of her translation of "Tale Concerning
the First Beginning" is a straightforward rendering that only hints at
Difference:
Yes, indeed. In this world there was no one at all. Always
the sun came up; always he went in. No one in the morning
gave him sacred meal; no one gave him prayer sticks; it
was very lonely. He said to his two children: "You will go
into the fourth womb. Your fathers, your mothers, käeto·we, tcu-eto·we, mu-eto·we, le·-eto-we, all the society
priests, society p̂ekwins, society bow priests, you will bring
out yonder into the light of your sun father." Thus he said
to them. They said, "But how shall we go in?" "That will
be all right." Laying their lightning arrow across their
rainbow bow, they drew it. Drawing it and shooting down,
they entered. ("Zuñi Origin Myths" 584)
Though they would realize this is a translation, of course, because of
the terms left in Zuni and probably because of culture-specific
references such as "society bow priests," readers of English would
again find nothing to indicate that this is a passage of oral literature
(and poetry instead of prose, according to many contemporary students
of Native American oral narrative [e.g., Hymes]) in a language whose
structures differ substantially from the Indo-European. A clear sense of
Identity emerges despite the translator’s recognition of Difference.
Dennis Tedlock’s translations of Zuni oral narratives—most of
which were originally published in Finding The Center in 1972—reflect
more clearly than Bunzel’s their common sense of the Difference
between Zuni and English. Tedlock also goes farther than either of his
predecessors by stressing that an important distinguishing factor
between the original performances and their translated textualizations
involves the media through which they are realized. Difference figures
prominently in Tedlock’s handling of Zuni oral literature because it is
Zuni and because it is oral. Influenced not only by the continuing
emphasis in anthropology on Difference as represented by cultural
8
pluralism and relativism, but also by the emergent "ethnography of
communication" in the 1960s (Gumperz and Hymes) which emphasized
the complexity of communicative activity and the need to record all its
aspects—not just the text-message—Tedlock has written extensively on
the translation practices of his predecessors at Zuni and his own
methods. Many of these writings were collected in the volume The
Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in 1983.
Critical to Tedlock’s assumption of Difference as a basis for
translating Zuni oral literature is his statement that "Those who have
sought to transform the spoken arts of the American Indian into printed
texts have attempted to cross linguistic, poetic, and cultural gulfs much
larger than those faced by translators who merely move from one
Indo-European written tradition to another" (The Spoken Word 31).
Particular problems which Zuni presents when one attempts to
transform narratives composed in it into English, according to Tedlock,
include some of those identified by Bunzel: word order and use of
special vocabulary, for instance (Finding the Center xxvii– xxviii). He
also notes (as Bunzel’s translations show that she also recognized) that
some Zuni words—interjections, proper names, opening and closing
tale formulas1—defy translation into English (Finding the Center
xxviii–xxx). Moreover, he stresses how the principle of Difference
affects the general perception of the stories he has translated. What
Zunis "picture" when they perform or hear oral literature differs from
what Euramerican readers might visualize. Tedlock admits, "[N]othing
I could do would make them experience . . . [oral literature] precisely
as a Zuni does" (Finding the Center xxxi).
Meanwhile, like Dell Hymes, Tedlock also argues that prose
translations of oral narrative obscure its nature: "[P]rose has no real
existence outside the written page" (Finding the Center xix). Consequently, he suggests Difference in medium of presentation by rendering
Zuni oral narratives poetically, equating line breaks with pauses of
one-half to three-fourths of a second.
Tedlock’s translation of the conclusion of a folktale entitled "Coyote
and Junco" offers a glimpse of his technique. The narrative picks up
after a two- or three-second pause by storyteller Andrew Peynetsa:
Coyote said, "QUICK SING," that’s what he told her
[Junco].
She didn’t sing.
Junco left her shirt for Coyote.
He bit the Junco, CRUNCH, he bit the round rock.
Right here (points to molars) he knocked out the teeth, the
rows of teeth in back.
(tight) "So now I’ve really done it to you."
"AY! AY!" that’s what he said.
9
THE PRAIRIE WOLF WENT BACK TO HIS CHILDREN, and by the time he got back there his children
were dead.
Because this was lived long ago, Coyote has no teeth here
(points to molars).
LEE————SEMKONIKYA. (laughs)
(Finding the Center 83)
In addition to the pacing of the oral performance, marked by line
divisions, Tedlock’s translation indicates precise features of how
Peynetsa told the story through words printed completely in upper case
(spoken more loudly), italicized comments in parentheses (tone of
voice, gestures, audience reactions), and a long dash following a vowel
within a word (lengthening of about two seconds). In other passages,
Tedlock signals such lengthening by repetition of letters. He also uses
typography to mark softening of voice (small type) and changes in pitch
(superscripting and subscripting words or syllables).
While Difference in medium emerges from what amounts to
typographic manipulation, Tedlock does little more than Bunzel to
suggest linguistic/cultural Difference. In this passage, he leaves the
closing formula—which Cushing usually handled as "Thus shortens my
story" (e.g., Zuñi Folktales 92)—untranslated. Elsewhere, he does the
same with opening formulas (Cushing’s "In the days of the ancients"
[e.g., Zuñi Folktales 65]). He also attempts to match the tone and level
of Zuni diction by using the relatively formal "prairie wolf" for the
penultimate occurrence of "coyote." Occasionally, Tedlock creates the
same effect by translating Zuni interjections with English archaisms.
The formulaic "that’s what he told her [said]" also represents the Zuni
(printed on facing pages only for "Coyote and Junco") and may help to
communicate Difference, but the major factor in creating this effect is
the appearance of the text on the printed page. Tedlock’s translations
do not look like most textualizations of oral narratives in paragraphed
prose; they are poetry, but poetry which incorporates constant
reminders of the relevance of the principle of Difference in the media
of presentation.
Superficially, applying Fredric Jameson’s dichotomy between
Identity and Difference to the translation of Native American oral
literature may seem simply a restatement of the tension that has
characterized translation theory and practice for centuries. Every
translator must choose if his or her completed work will preserve
elements of the source language (SL) original even when they are
obscure and ineffective in the target language (TL). The alternative is
to sacrifice SL for the sake of readability in TL (Bassnett-McGuire
68–72). Most translators have taken the latter course and produced
translations—like Alexander Pope’s rendering of Homer in heroic
10
couplets—which their readers can appreciate. But the Identity–Difference dichotomy involves more than a choice of whether to favor SL
or TL. For instance, in creating his texts translated from Zuni which
favored TL, Cushing—if his and Powell’s published comments are
sincere—did not believe he was sacrificing SL at all. He saw such
Identity between Zuni and English that there was no reason to indicate
Difference. At the other extreme, Tedlock, who would seem to favor
SL at the expense of TL, does not really do so. His translations, though
preserving some of the Difference he perceived in Zuni oral narrative,
were originally published by a trade press and are readily accessible for
readers willing to deal with the typographic manipulations, which are
products of Difference in medium, not of the translator’s favoring SL.
Of the three translators treated here, only Bunzel may have been
influenced by the translator’s conventional dilemma of favoring SL or
TL. Like Pope, she recognized the essential Difference between SL and
TL and produced a text that favored the latter, but unlike him she may
have done so because she believed there could be no other way to bring
the Zuni into English.
Moreover, I am using the Identity-Difference dichotomy to apply
also to media of presentation. Neither Cushing nor Bunzel seemed to
perceive that the orality of Zuni literature made it Different from
written prose and poetry, so neither did anything to suggest the original
orality in their translations. Only Tedlock recognized and marked media
Difference in his translations.
Consequently, Identity and Difference—extended to the principles
governing the translation of Native American oral literature from
Fredric Jameson’s original conceptualization—offers a handle for
dealing with the ways translators have worked. The Zuni case study
provides an illustration of what might be done on a larger scale with
the entire history of Euramerican textualizations and translations of
Native North American oral performances from the Jesuits in New
France through the current ethnopoetics movement. Looking at
textmakers and their translations in terms of the dichotomy does not
presuppose that those designated as adherents of Identity have produced
less "authentic" texts than exponents of Difference or vice versa. An
advocate of Identity may err by forcing Native American material into
Euramerican conventions, but a translator emphasizing Difference may
unnecessarily exoticize the material. The dichotomy, though, does
provide better consumer information. Readers will have a clearer idea
of how and why particular translations came about.
11
Note
1
Further study of Zuni allowed Tedlock to translate the conventional
opening formula as "Now we are taking it up" and the closing formula
as "Enough, the word is short" (The Spoken Word 65–66).
Works Cited
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. London:Methuen, 1980.
Boas, Franz. "Tsimshian Mythology." Thirty-First Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1916. 29–1037.
Bunzel, Ruth L. "Zuñi Origin Myths." Forty-Seventh Annual Report of
the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1932.
545–609.
———. "Zuñi Ritual Poetry." Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1932. 611–835.
———. Zuñi Texts. Publications of the American Ethnological Society
No. 15. New York: Stechert, 1933.
Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian. Twentieth-Century Poets and
the Native American. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1983.
Clements, William M. "Schoolcraft as Textmaker." Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 177–92.
Cushing, Frank Hamilton. "Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths."
Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington:
GPO, 1896. 332–462.
———. Zuñi Folk Tales. 1901. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986.
Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American. White Attitudes and U.S.
Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan U P, 1982.
Goldman, Irving. "Boas on the Kwakiutl: The Ethnographic Tradition."
Theory and Practice. Essays Presented to Gene Weltfish. Ed.
Stanley Diamond. The Hague: Mouton, 1980. 331–45.
Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds. The Ethnography of Communication. Washington: American Anthropological Association, 1964.
Hegeman, Susan. "Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problem of
Authenticity." American Quarterly 41 (1989): 265–83.
Hymes, Dell. "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American
Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. "Marxism and Historicism." New Literary History
11 (1979): 41–73.
Krupat, Arnold. "Identity and Difference in the Criticism of Native
American Literature." Diacritics 13 (1983): 2–13.
Pandey, Triloki Nath. "Anthropologists at Zuni." Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 116 (1972): 321–37.
Powell, John Wesley. "Introduction" to Cushing, Zuñi Folk Tales.
vii–xvii.
———. "Report of the Director." Second Annual Report of the Bureau
12
of Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1883. xv–xxxvii.
Simms, William Gilmore. Views and Reviews in American Literature
and Fiction. Ed. C. Hugh Holman. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1962.
Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center. Narrative Poetry of the Zuni
Indians. New York: Dial, 1972.
———. "On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative." Smoothing the
Ground. Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Ed. Brian
Swann. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 57–77.
———. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia:
U of Pennsylvania P, 1983.
Woodward, Arthur. "Frank Cushing—‘First War-Chief of Zuni.’"
Masterkey 13 (1939): 172–79.
*
*
*
13
*
NOBODY IS AN ORPHAN: Interview with Luci Tapahonso
Sylvie Moulin
In the past few years, Luci Tapahonso has become one of the most
powerful voices of her generation. She was born in Shiprock, New
Mexico, and her style combines the strength of the Navajo tradition
with the vivavity of a modern, concise, dynamic language. She is the
author of One More Shiprock Night (1981), Seasonal Woman (1981),
and A Breeze Swept Through (1987), and she has a fourth book in
preparation. This interview was done in Luci Tapahonso’s office at the
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, on June 18, 1989. Luci is
now teaching in the English Department of the University of Kansas.
SM: Luci, what is your background?
LT: I’m from Shiprock, New Mexico, and I’m Navajo. My mother’s
clan is To di//i o̧o̧vhi//i and my father’s clan is To di//i chi//ini//i. I grew up
in Shiprock. I went to boarding school when I was small, and then to
public school.
SM: When did you start writing poetry?
LT: Probably in high school.
SM: What does poetry mean to you? Why didn’t you choose another
art to express yourself?
LT: I didn’t really choose it, I think it just happened. I guess I really
like poetry because it’s concise, it’s short, and it has a rhythm to it. It’s
almost like singing. It’s very visual and it has a lot of impact.
SM: You also use songs and chants in some of your poems.
LT: Yes.
SM: Has the Navajo tradition a great influence on your poetry?
LT: It just depends what kind of work I am doing at the moment. But
I think the influence of the Navajo tradition is very strong because
that’s what I am. In the way that I think, in the way that I talk, it’s
already there, it’s already properly Navajo just by itself. So when I
write that’s the way it is, because poetry is an oral kind of expression
and you can’t really separate yourself, the voice that you are, from
what you write.
SM: Did you grow up speaking mainly Navajo?
LT: Yes. Until I went to school I spoke Navajo more than I spoke
English, although I knew English already. As I went to school I spoke
English more. Now I speak English a lot more than I speak Navajo
because I’m not around Navajo people as much as I used to be.
14
SM: A lot of writers and artists claim to be influenced by the Southwest. Do you think the environment, the scenery, have a strong
influence on you?
LT: It influences me because of where I live and also the way I was
raised. When I was growing up they used to say that nobody is an
orphan, that everybody has a mother and that your mother is the Earth
and your father is the Sky. So you are always between the two and they
are always looking over you. Those kinds of things can’t be separated,
because that’s the way Navajos talk and think. It’s not a separate issue.
At least I don’t think about it consciously. And I believe that a lot of
Navajo people, a lot of Indian people, think that way. When I talk with
Indian people we always talk about the same thing and it’s always about
the land in one way or another.
SM: In your poetry you often mention your family relations, your
children. Is that a major source of inspiration for you?
LT: It is, because to me it’s very personal, and I don’t write about
things that I’m not familiar with. Poetry is very good because it allows
me that form of expression. And I think it’s universal even though it’s
my family, my children, my brothers and sisters or whatever. I know
it’s a universal feeling. And when people hear the poems, they don’t
know a thing about my family, they don’t need to know anything about
it, but they think about how it relates to them, and so it’s universal in
a sense.
SM: You also talk a lot about women, friends or women who are
important in your life. And I know you hate to be called a feminist. So
how do you feel when people say that you are a feminist writer?
LT: (Laugh) I think our society is not really used to women being
vocal or showing appreciation of other women. But I grew up in a
matriarchal culture and it’s not necessarily that women are more
important, but it’s just that women have a better status in the Navajo
society and in the Navajo family. So I think I’m a typical Navajo
person and I think Navajo men feel the same way I do about women
because there is a strong sense of respect that the Navajo people have
raised for women. The whole family and the home are centered around
the woman. They say that the woman is the center of the home and that
through the woman all beauty and all good things come out from the
center of the home. So everything women do is very important, even
the way you dress, the way you fix your hair. The status that the
woman has in the Navajo culture has always been there.
But it’s unusual in a non-Navajo society because women have not
been treated well for the most part in western societies. They have not
been treated the way they should have been. So when people see that
15
in my work, perhaps they think I’m a feminist. To them overthrowing
the men is feminism, overthrowing men or becoming better than men.
But in the Navajo society it’s not that, it’s being equal and it’s having
a status that’s different from the one non-Indian people have.
There’s also a problem of terminology. What does the word feminist
mean? It means to value or appreciate, to have respect for the
individual regardless of the gender. It doesn’t mean women having an
equal status with men. It’s a word that people throw around and it starts
having some negative connotations, but it has a different meaning
behind it. It’s like people saying "she is a real libber." That’s not good
because then you think about burning bras, hating men, that kind of
stuff.
SM: What are the most important topics for you?
LT: I don’t know if I really have inspirational things. I’m just writing
all the time. I have a journal that I write in every day, and I write all
the time. Some things turn into poems and some things don’t, it just
depends. I know that I’m really observant. I really watch, notice things
a lot. I listen to people a lot, more than I talk, probably. Sometimes
something will happen that will make me really think and work to turn
it into a poem. For the most part it comes together over a period of
time, maybe three days, maybe two weeks.
SM: Do you sit down every day at the same time to write?
LT: No. I wish I had the luxury of sitting down at the same time. I
just write whenever I have a chance, and I never know when that will
be. Sometimes I say that I’m going to take a nap, and then the kids
know that they have to leave me alone. Then I write instead of taking
a nap. (Pause) Most of the times I take a nap. (Laugh) It just depends
on what my schedule is.
When I’m traveling I don’t write in my journal as much as I write
poetry. When I travel I write a poem a day. Writing a poem is a lot of
work for me and I really want to make it succinct and powerful and get
as much as I can without rambling on and on. So when I travel and
write a poem a day it really makes me work but I like it. So wherever
I go I make sure that I have poems from that time because things there
are different from what they are afterwards. When I’m not traveling I
usually have twenty things to do all the time, and then it’s just a matter
of finding that time to word it. Then I write more journal.
There is no formula; it’s just something that comes together. Maybe
I hear something that someone says and it’s a good line. So I keep that
and I keep working on it. And I can really write poetry anywhere,
anytime. It’s not the act of writing as much as it is to create it and
formulate it in my mind. I really like to drive because it gives me that
freedom to write as I am driving. I can do it anytime, when I’m
16
cooking, when I’m mopping the floor. It gives me a nice escape instead
of getting impatient in the grocery line. I don’t have to be there. I
mean, I’m physically there in the line, but in my mind I’m writing
poetry. It’s nice, it’s like a place I can go to anytime, and I don’t get
upset by these little things that I might otherwise mind.
SM: One thing that has always fascinated me in your poetry is the
number of texts about driving. A lot of people see driving as a pain, a
struggle, but I drive a lot myself and find it very inspiring, too. I
remember a poem from A Breeze Swept Through about your driving
back to Shiprock . . .
LT: Yes, and I think it’s very common in this area. I was talking to
somebody over the weekend and she was saying: "To me the most
important is a full tank, a car in good condition and a good sound
system. Then I’m all set." That’s the way I feel. I have my box of
tapes and a big Diet Coke and I’m happy.
SM: What do you listen to when you are on the road?
LT: All kinds of things, mostly country western music. It’s kind of
depressing, but one or two of them are really cute. I listen to some
tapes I got when I went to Hawaii, jazz, classical. I don’t listen to rock
too much, but my kids do. (Laugh)
SM: Do you think you reach a broad audience or mainly people from
the Southwest?
LT: I think it’s pretty broad. I know it’s Southwestern in terms of the
land and the landmarks. But the emotional content can be read pretty
much all over the country. The only thing they don’t understand is the
land, the desert. Like in Hawaii, they think we can’t open the door
without looking to make sure there is not a snake waiting to come in.
Really, they think we are just plagued by snakes. It’s funny. (Laugh)
SM: How do you see your future as a poet?
LT: Well, hopefully I’ll have another book published and I’ll get a
grant to take some time off from teaching and just write.
SM: Are you still doing storytelling?
LT: Not really. I do more poetry than storytelling. It’s hard to get
paid at least half of what you should get. I got to the point where I do
five or six benefits a semester, that’s it. It takes a lot of energy to do
a good job, and people think that you just go there and do it. (Pause).
I also have a children’s book coming out at Northern Arizona Press.
That’s a good area to go into.
SM: Do you plan to write a novel?
LT: Maybe. I have that story I gave you that is a fiction [Luci was
17
referring to "What I Am"]. That might just happen. It came together
really quickly and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. But at this
point I don’t see that happening. I don’t really like to write fiction.
Poetry is better for me. I think I’d like to try writing scripts. Wouldn’t
it be nice to get paid to write from 8:00 to 5:00? It would be wonderful.
Selected Bibliography of Works by Luci Tapahonso
A Breeze Swept Through. Los Angeles: West End Press, 1987.
One More Shiprock Night. San Antonio: Tejas Art Press, 1981.
Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Press, l981.
"The Way It Is." Sign Language. New York: Aperture, 1988. With
photographs by Skeet McAuley.
"What I Am." Recent Ones that are Made. Santa Fe: Wheelwright
Museum of the American Indian, July 1988. Rpt. in Sonora Review
14. Tucson: U of Arizona, Spring 1989.
*
*
*
18
*
THREE VIEWS OF POWWOW HIGHWAY
Easin’ on Down the Powwow Highway(s)
Rodney Simard
That American Indians have always been a staple of the film
industry is news for no one; suburban adolescent and Native ethnographer alike have been awash in largely stereotypical images, both
positive and—primarily—negative, since the first silent two-reelers and
serials until the current primacy of television and video. From the
beginning, the "Western" has been a primary film genre, embodying
and reflecting a romanticized notion of American ideals: potentiality,
individuality, recreation, primal heroism, manifest destiny, savagism
and civilization. But it has also been a genre not bound by national
borders, appealing instead to a geography of the mind; witness the birth
of the "New Western" in Italy in the 1960s and the enduring popularity
of these films in Europe and the Orient.
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., asserts, correctly I believe, that the
enduring film images of Indians are derived from the captivity
narratives, the earliest American literary genre, as transmuted through
the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and pulp fiction, to current
fiction and the mass media (104). As a genre, the Western has
developed its own conventions and formulae, to which the Indian
character has been made to conform; the resultant images, the stereotypes that emerged from earlier media, are generally polarized as two
extremes described by Michael Hilger: "the blood-thirsty savage and
the noble but doomed savage as fictions to emphasize the superiority
of . . . white heroes, to comment on contemporary political issues or to
serve the needs of the western genre" (1). Hilger goes on to note that
"even such great directors as D. W. Griffith and John Ford portray the
Indian as always too good or too bad; as such they are often the most
extreme fictions in the western, a genre which seldom comes very close
to reality" (1). Note that savage is the operative word in this explication, echoing the brilliant paradigm of the American consciousness
outlined by Roy Harvey Pearce.
Images of Indian blood thirst in film are countered by considerably
fewer hand-wringing laments about vanishing Red nobility (Hilger’s
filmography lists 830 films through 1984; he also reminds us of the
central importance of the techniques of cinematography in creating and
perpetuating stereotypes, 3–5). Most frequently, positive depiction of
Indians in film is equally stereotyped, from the Viet Nam parables
inherent in Little Big Man and Soldier Blue to the "pseudofactual
mélange of anthropological blunders and white supremacy" of A Man
Called Horse (Stedman 260).
19
To its credit, Powwow Highway avoids the usual polarities and the
stereotypes attendant upon them. It is a very good film, but it is
decidedly not David Seals’ excellent novel, Powwow Highway, upon
which it was based with a high degree of fidelity—and an equally high
degree of quite odd interpolation and omission.
The greatest strength of the film is in its performances. As Philbert
Bono, Gary Farmer is a casting director’s dream: his size, with its
suggested power and gentleness, is exactly Philbert’s, and his seraphic
expression captures precisely Philbert’s unusual mixture of the inspired
and the dim. The scene of his waking in the Denver condominium, as
he nakedly luxuriates in the absurdly small child’s twin bed, conveys
with imagistic precision the narrative description of Seals’ novel
(231–33). Farmer’s performance is perfection; he is Philbert. Too often
in the novel, Seals’ ironic tone seems to diminish the fundamental
importance of Philbert’s epiphany and quest as the author attempts to
put Philbert’s vision in the correct perspective of his limited intelligence. Farmer’s laconic performance never suggests any such
disjunction between the high and the low, fusing the two instead into
a seamless and consistent whole.
More problematic is A Martinez as Buddy Red Bow (why the shift
of the family name from Red Bird?), not only in terms of ethnicity, but
also in his tentativeness in the role. Largely convincing and effective,
Martinez does seem uncomfortable with his Indianness, but this may
indeed be Buddy’s problem as well; still, such hesitation and discomfort are amplifications of the novel. Joanelle Nadine Romero as Bonnie
brings a startling beauty to her character, one inherent in the character
of Bonnie, but Romero is madonna-like in her physical presence,
emphasized throughout the film, and particularly in the shot of her in
jail as she awaits Bunny’s arrival. Many of the lesser roles, most
evidently cast with Indian actors, are also convincing and effective,
infusing the experience of the film with a necessary mixture of
reverence and humor.
Even with considerable reshaping of the source, the film is effective
in its own terms. Indian material is not slighted—even if it is frequently
distorted. The value of Powwow Highway is that it is an organic,
effective film and, more importantly, that it attempts to present Indian
material from an Indian perspective, something that few of the products
of Hollywood (and other points) have ever even attempted. Still, it
bears evidence of conformity to the genre. For example, the film ends
in a predictable car chase, for no reason apparent other than the
formulaic expectation of such an event. Not only is this a distortion of
the event from the original narrative, but it also tends to eclipse the
essential motivation of the work: Philbert’s vision quest and his
acquisition of his tokens for his medicine bundle. In fact, his quest is
20
completely forgotten in the last segment of the film as the rescue-ofthe-maiden motif dominates entirely. More disturbing is the inflation of
the role of Chief Billy Little Old Man. In the novel, aware of Buddy’s
deviation from his appointed task of buying bulls with tribal money, he
waits patiently and hopefully for the return of the prodigal, an
important factor in the future of the tribe. But in the film he goes to
Santa Fe, the very portrait of the wise and stoic chief, albeit in
contemporary manifestation. He is even the agent by which the final
escape is effected. Again, a stereotypical elder, the embodiment of
patience and wisdom, is offered to counter the excesses of the young
"bucks."
More importantly, complexity of character is diminished, edging
uncomfortably close to stereotypes, and the broad political canvas of
the novel (Seals was a member of AIM) has been reduced to a simple
polarity. Granting that elision and compression are necessary in most
cases of transferring a narrative from one medium to another, particularly from novel to film, one cannot avoid the implications of many
alterations in this script. Examples abound: drug ingestion has been
radically reduced from the novel, but perhaps the filmmakers were
trying to avoid the stereotype of the "drunken Indian." Lester and
Doris, their subplot and their involvement in the main plot, have been
excised. The violence and anger attendant upon Buddy’s attack on the
Radio Shack have been contextualized and rationalized. Most details of
family relationships have been streamlined and/or distorted. Discursive
cultural details in the novel have been translated into simple images.
Philbert’s theft from the Santa Fe police station has been reduced by
90%. Bull Miller has been portrayed as a figure familiar to the newest
revival of film noir. The very Indian party in the Denver condo is
missing. And the like. Perhaps solid reasons underlie all these alterations—and many more—but speculation does suggest a few very
familiar and unfortunate possibilities. Without the direct testimony of
the filmmakers, perhaps the best position is suggested by a paraphrase
and elaboration on the famous remark by Gladstone: a reasonable
person does not want to know how sausages, laws, and movies are
made.
Inescapable and more insidious, to me, are two other aspects of the
film. First is its anti-feminism and, in context, anti-Indian portrayal of
women. Romero does make an exquisite Bonnie, but she is not Seals’
tough and intelligent survivor. By making her into a madonna, the film
shears away her battle scars, for the character in the novel, while
beautiful, is hardly a saint. Bonnie has been and continues to be a
promiscuous drug dealer, qualities that add depth, complexity, and
humanity to her character. She is precisely not the stereotypical
"Princess," but rather a very real woman who can, for the most part,
21
ably take care of herself as she explores and expands the restricted
range of potentiality offered to Indian women in the world today.
Similarly, her youngest child, Jane, has been made older than her
brother, Sky, and neither child acts with the admirable self-reliance of
her or his counterpart in the novel. To make the women and children
of the film ineffectually reliant on men distorts many of the realities of
both historical and contemporary Indian cultures, however desirable or
"safe" such a depiction might be from a Hollywood perspective.
A second problem is the complexity of the antecedent action of the
novel being reduced to a simple opposition. Philbert’s quest having
given way to the rescue plot, the film encapsulates the antagonists into
the targeted "apple," Sandy Youngblood, who has become the representative of a mining company that wants reservation rights. Bonnie is
framed in order to lure Buddy away during a critical tribal vote.
Immediately alarming is the notion that Buddy is the sole savior of his
people, who, without his wayward but paternalistic presence, will yet
once again sell away their lifeblood because of their child-like trust
(more alarming still in the context of that symbol being portrayed by
a non-Indian actor). But also disturbing is the reduction of the tangles
of political and criminal nets that the original narrative is enmeshed in.
AIM, the FBI, the Mafia, the BIA—all the purposefully vague and
confused political factors of the novel, all of whom contribute to a
complex, sinister, and insidious atmospheric feeling—are conveniently,
too conveniently, rolled into a familiar force: a materialistic and
exploitative white corporation that can, by means of a simple trick, rob
the Indians of their possessions. This stereotype is obviously reductive,
however convenient it might be in terms of film explication and plot
development, and it also strips the novel of an important dimension of
Indian truth. The forces of opposition are and always have been many
and multifacted, alien to the point of obscurity, and a consistent state
of vague paranoia is not necessarily a pathological condition. It is a
reality, one that the film distorts. To reduce the complexity of the plot
is to reduce the Indian experience.
I could quibble about lesser points of sanitization or distortion, like
the impression of humor the movie generates. Much that is comedic is
inherent, both verbally and physically, but by removing such scenes as
the party in the Denver condo, the particularly holistic sense of Indian
humor is missing, the ability to see both sides of a situation simultaneously. Still, Powwow Highway is a good film and it is an important
film for the advances it makes. Euramerica can find much to learn
from it. One stills hopes, however, for the validity of future efforts.
Several projects have recently been announced in the press (significantly in Hollywood itself); perhaps soon audiences will be exposed to an
Indian world-view, complete in its own holistic complexity and
integrity.
22
Works Cited
Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf,
1978.
Hilger, Michael. The American Indian in Film. Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow, 1986.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian
and the American Mind. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1965.
Seals, David. Powwow Highway. New York: Plume–NAL, 1979.
Stedman, Raymond William. Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in
American Culture. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1982.
*
*
*
*
Culture Isn’t Buckskin Shoes:
A Conversation Around Powwow Highway
Toby Langen and Kathryn Shanley
I have seen Powwow Highway over a dozen times, mostly in the
company of students in my classes. Perhaps because of the classroom
venue, I find myself doing two things at once: enjoying the film and
disapproving of it. Kathryn Shanley has the same kind of divided
reaction, though hers seems to be more complex, incorporating as it
does an interest in the intersection of Indian and non-Indian points of
view at the level of popular culture. What follows is the abridged
transcript of a conversation we had about Powwow Highway. In
addition to shortening the transcript, I also did some rearranging, so
that all our remarks on a given topic show up now in the same vicinity.
T.L.
KS: One of the things that interests me most is how Indian humor
intersects with, overlaps with and remains separate from non-Indian
humor. I’m interested in places where Indians laugh because they share
knowledge of particular ways of life and laugh for different reasons
than in a knee-jerk, Hollywood situational kind of comedy. And one of
those places, I would say, has to do with the business of the signs
Philbert has to find. He finds a piece of ice which melts, and it’s
comical that he finds something that is going to evaporate. I could see
23
why Indians would laugh at something like that, because Indian people
like to tease each other a lot.
When people get to know a person and what that person is characterized by—say, cynicism or naivete or optimism or whatever—people
will then tease them, find ways to tease them on the basis of who they
are and their personality. It’s not stereotyping people. It’s really finding
ways to identify them: in some respects to test them and, in other
respects, to embrace them. Howard Norman’s Wishing Bone Cycle
makes that evident. In all of those stories, there’s a gap between how
the individual sees himself or herself and imagines that a name is going
to be earned, because the individual wants to be called a certain
something. So pride is the initial trigger to some kind of adventure, and
then the person ultimately gets another name. Sometimes the name is
somewhat mocking about the initial pride, but the way that seems to
work is that we’re never what we think we are. This is very much a
part of my own philosophy—we are, in fact, defined by others every
bit as much as we’re defined by ourselves.
So when you have Philbert going off and collecting these little
things, it’s funny: it’s sweet, and he believes it, and so on. But to an
Indian person, it’s funny in a different way.
That was what originally led me to want to talk about this: why
Indians would like a film like this, but why I would find a lot politically objectionable. I think a white audience would laugh at Philbert
because he’s a big, fat, dumb Indian. Given the fact that this is the only
Indian movie I can think of with Indian actors in years and
years—where they play the lead roles—it just gets into that kind of
political crunch. If there were more representative films, maybe I
wouldn’t feel so defensive about this one.
TL: Some of my students had an interesting reaction to Philbert when
they first saw him. They had gotten the film from the comedy shelf at
the video store, so they had a certain set of expectations. One of my
students said it starts off showing you a junkyard and a bar full of
drunken Indians, and then here’s this guy who’s none too swift sitting
at the bar, and she almost turned it off right there. She said, "I don’t
want to watch something that stereotypes Indians like this."
KS: Is she a non-Indian?
TL: Non-Indian, yes.
KS: Well, I just taught Earth Power Coming in an advanced short
fiction course. That was the first text of the course, because there are
many stories in there that are traditional, and I wanted to make that
connection. But Gerald Vizenor’s "Reservation Cafe" is also in there.
The class was composed of fifty students, including one Black student,
one student who was Puerto Rican and Filipino, and one Indian student.
24
And many people in the class had trouble granting that Gerald Vizenor
was making fun of Indians. I went back to the definitions of satire and
explained that nothing is sacred to satirists. Then we could finally open
the discussion to something real about what was going on in that story.
Similarly, I think I could see where it would be hard for a non-Indian to get past the junkyard and so on, because there’s a desire to be
politically correct. People are attempting to live out of the kind of
sensitivity to how others might feel in being portrayed that way. I think
that happens a lot with non-Indians.
TL: We had trouble with the first story in Love Medicine, the same
trouble, where June walks off to her death. People responded to that by
saying they didn’t see how anyone who was trying to be politically
conscious could present a spectacle like that to a readership of
non-Indians.
KS: I personally kind of agree.
TL: Do you?
KS: Yes. I found I was not a great fan of The Color Purple, either.
I had a similar sense about it. There is some kind of sensationalism
going on when you begin that way. There are many ways to begin:
why begin like that?
TL: About Love Medicine, I wonder whether starting out with an
image that collects all kinds of negative things, and then going on and
telling everything else, so that by the time you get to the end that first
image is now something very different, whether you’re then enabled to
see through that first image to more things than just the negative.
I thought of the movie as playing with the first image of Philbert
and leading you to change your mind. For a non-Indian, I think it’s a
good thing to be forced, or given a chance, to take a second look at an
Indian who is not idealized.
KS: One of the things I think that Indians are up against in trying to
be real and to present themselves in any real way, is all these expectations that they are more noble and so on and so forth.
There are characters in Powwow Highway that are just as bad as any
characters could be in any culture. The auntie trying to pretend that this
was an old Indian saying that Dull Knife had told her father: "Get your
pony out of my garden." That was funny, but to an Indian I think it
would be funny in a different way than it would be to a non-Indian.
There were a couple of other characters, like the guy who wants to go
to Billings and get pussy—he seemed true to life to me.
But, on the other hand, I think that ultimately some of these things
fuel anti-Indian sentiment, especially Treaty Beer kinds of organizations. "Look, there are no real Indians left." You can look at a movie
25
like Powwow Highway, and what do you have when you’re finished?
You have somebody like Philbert. Is he going to hold a tradition
together? Is Indian religion reduced then to this one big, sweet, lovable
dumb guy?
Then you have the activist, Red Bow: he’s going to go off with a
feisty Texan blonde, his sister hadn’t talked to him for ten years, and
her kids don’t know that they’re even Indian. You’re not left with any
sense that anything Indian survives. You’re left with the same old
Hollywood dichotomy: Big Brother is trying to get the Indians, and the
Indians become heroes you cheer for. There is a catharsis, and then
you go home. You’re no better off for having seen that film. Politically, I don’t think anyone will be better off for having seen that
film—and I’m saying that as someone who really likes it.
TL: Well, some of my students, anyway, took it as a lesson that even
though things might not have survived and you can’t get all the
information that people used to have, yet it’s still possible to get back
in touch with a belief system by yourself and go after something that
you didn’t get handed down through the family but that you want for
yourself. It was a message of hope, not in a tribal way, but in a
personal way, for them.
KS: Okay, that’s fine. But that’s not Indian. Vine Deloria said one
time that it’s fine for people to do the various things they do in the
city, to sit in sweat baths and so on together, and maybe there’s a very,
very small sense of community and a personal sense of cleansing. But
it’s not the ceremony that it is at home in an Indian community, on the
land, in that place.
I certainly wouldn’t begrudge anyone any amount of hope they can
find any place in this world. But, on the other hand, I’m talking in
terms of what works politically for Indians. It’s just such an interestingly Hollywood approach. For example, one scene that worked the
worst and the best in the film for me was when the goons came into the
gym at the Christmas powwow. The goons were so unrealistic, I felt.
They came out of West Side Story. There was nothing about that
encounter that rang true at all. Then, in the bleachers when he’s talking
to the Vietnam vet, Buddy says something to the effect that dancing on
a basketball floor doesn’t make culture. The vet just cries. I found that
absolutely touching. Culture isn’t a matter of having buckskin shoes or
whatever. It really is a spirit of getting together and being together in
a way that is ritually agreed upon as meaningful. So the way in which
Red Bow is gradually persuaded to be more than simply political was,
I thought, pretty powerful.
TL: So for you, then, there’s something unfortunate in the emphasis
on Philbert as a solitary seeker. You mentioned that guy who wants to
26
go get pussy: he treats Philbert just as badly as a non-Indian might. So
that scene establishes the fact that Philbert isn’t a highly regarded
person among his own people, and by going on this quest, if you want
to describe it that way, he’s not forging a way into the community for
himself.
KS: Yes. To ask for real time and real space in film is ridiculous, but
there’s no sense that Philbert has a livelihood or a place. What is he
going to do? He has no connection anywhere. On the other hand, the
kind of politico that Red Bow is, which strikes me as essentially
Marxist and atheistic—his transformation is actually more powerful as
an image of return to some kind of belief. It makes more sense. But
then, in the end he goes off with that feisty Texan woman; it seems to
pull the whole thing back into American mainstream. If he went back
to an Indian woman, it would have been a more separatist act, and then
it would have given the movie more of a revolutionary sense.
TL: I felt that whole theme of the love interest between Red Bow and
the woman was irrelevant, that it took away from the direction in which
they had been trying to develop his character, which was to get back
in touch with some practices and a different way of thinking, to expand
his set of values beyond the political. Also, at the point where Philbert
pulls down the jailhouse wall, I got to feeling, "This movie is no longer
what it started out to be; now we’re in a Western."
KS: I think in contemporary Indian politics that kind of feisty, angry
activist that Red Bow is existed only briefly. The AIM-type Indian
political people have a certain turf. People like Russell Means can get
the national ear; they can be interviewed in Penthouse, but their place
in Indian politics on the reservation is very questionable. There are
many hard-working Indian people who are very serious about getting
the job done, not the Red Bow kind of hothead.
TL: Did it bother you when Red bow appropriated the money for his
own use? I don’t know why we always have to think of everything that
every Indian character does as then representative of the whole universe
of Indian people, but I guess that’s what we’re worrying about. If Red
Bow, who is pursuing certain practical goals, yet is so irresponsible as
to take the money for the bulls and go and use it for personal projects,
is that something one wants to have people look at if they’re not
already friends?
KS: It’s an interesting thing, now that you mention it. I was trying to
remember in the film what day of the week these things happened. He
got the call from his sister on a Friday, and the bull thing was actually
happening on Saturday when the bank was closed. So I think he might
have felt that at the beginning of the next week he could get some
27
money somewhere when the banks were open. What disturbed me more
was what he did with the money, the fact that he bought the stereo and
so on.
So, yes, it was interesting. But again, every single image was
undercut in the film: the image of spiritual quest, of wisdom from the
elders; then here is this committed, political individual who does
something against the tribe. About the only character in the film who
comes off as truly exemplary is the tribal chairman.
TL: When you say all these characters are undercut, do you see that
as a conscious agenda aiming toward a statement that’s then made
successfully by the movie?
KS: I think it is a conscious agenda, and I think that’s what makes a
comedy—incongruity. That’s really how it functions, by incongruity,
and that’s fine. But politically—sometimes I think it works and
sometimes I think it doesn’t. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with
making fun of Indians; Indians make fun of themselves. But when you
have a cultural context in which it’s an appropriate kind of humor, then
it’s not degrading or undermining. I mean, it’s time that, in certain
respects, Indians weren’t taken so damn seriously. On the other hand,
maybe Indians need to be heard before that happens.
TL: Yes. Do you think it wasn’t time yet to make that movie?
KS: No. I don’t believe in censoring. After saying all this, I really
don’t. I teach books that I don’t agree entirely with, because the books
sometimes are an occasion for discussing all kinds of things. Similarly,
this movie is an occasion for discussing.
TL: I guess I don’t know how seriously to take the movie. Was it a
gimmick or a serious strategy to have Philbert get the piece of ice, the
thing that will melt, just when he has a vision of Dull Knife?
KS: I’m hesitant to say, because I do believe in visions and I believe
that they have powerful effects on people’s lives and in communities.
So the question then becomes: Why have a vision in a film? What does
somebody in mainstream America see it as? Maybe if it’s seen as
humor (the piece of ice that melts), there’s something redeemable in it.
TL: Were you made uncomfortable by the scene where Philbert gives
the Hershey bar? I thought a lot of people would get the wrong
impression from that scene: all you have to do is be in a good mood,
and you will achieve enlightenment.
KS: My response to that is complicated. Given the fact that the New
Age people these days are so interested in Indian religious stuff, I
wonder if it isn’t a good thing to present something relatively ridiculous, like the Hershey bar.
28
TL: My class didn’t think of it as ridiculous. They thought it was
sweet and touching.
KS: I don’t know what to say to that. The last shot, when the Hershey
bar is propped up against the rock and you look down over into the
Black Hills, struck me as Andy Warhol, pop-culture art. The Indian in
pop culture . . . I can imagine a critical approach to this movie that
says just that: this is all pop-culture stuff. What do they know in pop
culture about Indians? And then the movie just takes one thing after
another and mocks them. The Hershey bar would simply be one of
those things. If people have heard anything about Indians, they’ve
heard about vision quests and so on, so the movie just makes it
somewhat ridiculous with the mixture of the Hershey bar. That’s my
individual response.
TL: I’m sure my class didn’t take it in at that level at all. They saw
no irony whatever. I did have one dissenter, who was an Indian student,
who said that that was the place that made him the saddest of all; he
thought the movie was a comedy running over a level of sadness
because of all the things Philbert didn’t know. He took the scene as
being essentially sad, with the comedy as icing: the sadness feeding into
the quality of the laughter.
You know, this is what happens in my classes when we try to talk
about "authenticity" in regard to ways of presenting oral literature in
print. Everyone has such divergent ideas about what is authentic, what
needs to be prized in the original or privileged in the print version, that
it becomes difficult to remember that what set us off was presumably
a single text that we all read or saw. I guess I never till this moment
thought of this movie as itself a translation.
*
*
*
*
Powwow Highway in an Ethnic Film and Literature Course
Marshall Toman and Carole Gerster
A course in ethnic film and literature allows teachers to present
theories of racism and to ask students to apply these theories to films,
literature, and their own lives; to examine the construction and
attempted deconstruction of stereotypes; to realize for students
"forgotten" history or neglected contemporary reality; to foster the
ability to read film and literature critically; and to contrast the dominant
29
culture’s representations of ethnic groups with those groups’ own
voicing of their experience. Powwow Highway is an excellent film to
use in the Native American segment of such a course because, in
addition to students’ enjoying the film, it provides a contrast to many
standard media depictions of Indians, raises topical issues of crucial
importance, and, while remaining faithful to contemporary Indian
experience, also asserts this contemporary relevance from a traditional
Cheyenne perspective.
Jonathan Wacks’ 1988 film Powwow Highway helps set the agenda
for the Native American portion of our team-taught course on Ethnic
Film and Literature. We teach this film in conjunction with clips from
the film series Images and Indians and the PBS Frontline documentary
The Spirit of Crazy Horse, and with Louise Erdrich’s "Dear John
Wayne," Paula Gunn Allen’s "Grandmother," Elizabeth Sullivan’s
"Legend of the Trail of Tears," and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,
in a semester course that also includes films and literature by African
Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. We have found that
Powwow Highway helps raise student consciousness about topical issues
important to the Northern Cheyenne in particular and to Native
Americans in general. Told in contemporary as well as traditional tribal
terms, the film dismisses stereotypes, retells the cowboy-Indian conflict
from a Native American perspective, and demonstrates the dual
importance of reclaiming a traditional tribal identity and continuing the
political struggle for justice. Based on David Seals’ 1979 novel, the
film Powwow Highway depicts the interconnected ceremonial and
political journey of its two protagonists—Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer)
and Buddy Red Bow (A Martinez)—to become itself both ritual event
and political act.
Two of the important topics raised by the film are the Internecine
struggles involving the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the
poisoning of reservation drinking water by uranium mining. Powwow
Highway affords teachers the opportunity to acquaint students with one
of the most important manifestations of political dissent in this century
of United States history. Buddy and Wolf Tooth are veterans not only
of Vietnam but also of Wounded Knee (WK) II. Wounded Knee, South
Dakota, was the site, in 1890, of the massacre of 300 unarmed Lakota
men, women, and children by the U.S. cavalry, and, in 1972, of the
largest armed conflict in the U.S. since the Civil War (Locker).
Philbert’s virtual ignorance about WK II ("You weren’t in Wounded
Knee with us? Or Ogalala?" "No. But I remember hearing about it.")
underscores one of the main tensions within the movie: Philbert is
politically naive while Buddy—although he is of the reservation—has
negotiated the Anglo world and can apply legalistic, bureaucratic
solutions to Indian problems.
30
Good sources for the background of WK II and AIM include the
article-length analysis by Roos et al. and the book-length study by
Stephen Cornwell, but one of the best ways to present the material to
a class is to introduce the background information with excerpts from
the 1990 Frontline production The Spirit of Crazy Horse, narrated by
Milo Yellow Hair. In Powwow Highway, Imogene tells Buddy that the
reason the family must leave Pine Ridge is that "There’s a shooting a
week"; The Spirit of Crazy Horse includes an interview with the
Richards family, real victims of a Dick Wilson-sanctioned, drive-by
shooting. In Powwow Highway, when Miller is thwarted in his attempt
to beat up Buddy, Miller yells that "All you AIM sons-of-bitches are
going to rot in prison, just like your friend Peltier." The Spirit of Crazy
Horse interviews Peltier, asserts that he was framed by the federal
government and used as a political scapegoat, and in general provides
the background for his "rotting in prison."
In order for students to fully appreciate the import of the lines from
the film about Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge, and Leonard Peltier, we
sketch the salient background. WK II began in February of 1973. A
year previous to the occupation, on February 20, 1972, Raymond
Yellow Thunder was killed in Gordon, Nebraska. AIM, until then
largely an urban group, was called in to obtain justice; when two white
men were eventually found guilty of second degree manslaughter, AIM
was credited (Roos et al. 90). With growing support, AIM criticized
the Pine Ridge Tribal Government, headed by Dick Wilson, as corrupt
and subservient to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Wilson armed
his supporters, harassed AIM leaders, and suppressed public assemblies
and political debate; Wilson’s measures were countenanced by federal
authorities.
On the night of February 28, 1973, the American Indian
Movement led a band of rebels into Wounded Knee, just
miles from Pine Ridge. They captured the town, sacked the
general store, and barricaded themselves against the police.
It was an audacious stand to gain national attention. The 300
insurgents were immediately surrounded by combat-trained
federal marshals, F.B.I. agents, and Wilson’s vigilantes.
The next morning the world woke up to reports of a new
Indian war. (Locker)
The occupiers’ demands (which were varied and not always clear)
included the removal of Wilson; the return of treaty lands, particularly
the sacred Black Hills; the investigation of treaty violations; and an
increase in money and employment for the Lakotas (Roos et al. 90).
After the long, bitter, two-and-one-half month siege, AIM surrendered when investigations were promised; however, no substantial
31
action was ever taken. Internecine strife continued for the next thirty
months with over 60 people being murdered in the Pine Ridge area,
most of them AIM supporters (Locker). Finally, in June of 1975
Leonard Peltier organized several cars of AIM members to return to
Pine Ridge to protect AIM supporters. He became involved in a daylong shoot-out in which one Native American and two F.B.I. agents
were killed. After his trial, which sentenced him to life imprisonment
despite an F.B.I. document that was later released proving that the
agents could not have been killed by his gun,1 the worst of the violence
subsided; AIM was exhausted, Wilson was defeated in tribal elections,
and his vigilantes were disbanded (Locker).
In the film, Buddy represents resistance to accommodationist/assimilationist policy—as AIM did on Pine Ridge—and Sandy Youngblood and Miller reproduce the cooperation with the government and
policial suppression that Wilson and his "goon squad" (Locker) carried
out on Pine Ridge. Early on, the movie underscores the difference
between Buddy and Sandy with an allusion to the Fort Laramie Treaty.
Sandy wants to bring a mining company onto reservation lands, and
Buddy resists the initiative as exploitive. When Sandy argues in favor
of the mining company by saying that "Our employment contracts are
a matter of public record," Buddy counters with "Oh, yeah, yeah. I
read your contract. I read every damn contract since the Fort Laramie
Treaty of 1868. And it’s always the same deal, ain’t it? You get what
you want, and we get the shaft." The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty
reserved all of what is now South Dakota west of the Missouri River,
including the Black Hills, for the Sioux (Roos et al. 91). But then gold
was discovered in the Black Hills, and in 1889 the government carved
up the Greater Sioux Reservation into six smaller tracts so that gold
mining could take place (Irvin 91). Buddy’s point is that you can’t trust
such contracts. Nonetheless, for what are shown to be personally
selfish reasons, Sandy continues to cooperate with the federal government to help Overdyne exploit the reservation. Buddy, late in the film,
characterizes Sandy’s attitude as corrupt, rotten, when he cautions a
woman Sandy is speaking to in a bar that "sometimes you got to bite
the apple to see worms." The characterization of Sandy as an "apple"
is appropriate: he’s red on the outside but "white" underneath (see
Seals, TPH 114, 203).
A second topic of importance alluded to in the film is the poisoning
of reservation drinking water by the mining of radioactive materials.
Philbert doesn’t recognize the green bottle of Perrier handed to him in
Wolf Tooth’s home. Wolf Tooth explains the presence of the "yuppy
bullshit" (as Buddy refers to it) in his comparatively impoverished
surroundings: "Uranium mines have poisoned the White River from
here to Cactus Flat." Such a line affords us an opportunity to tell
32
students that to obtain 2.24 ounces of yellowcake (appropriate nuclear
fuel) a ton of rock must be mined. The ton, minus the 2.24 ounces, is
discarded as mill tailings which resemble fine sand and contain 80% of
the rock’s original radioactivity. Thorium 230 (half life 80,000 years),
Radium 226 (1,630 years), and Radon 222 exist in this sand which is
now subject to wind and water erosion. The extraction process yields
liquid wastes and a mud-like by-product called "slime," both highly
radioactive and disposed of by dilution and dumping into a stream. "In
1962, 200 tons of radioactive mill tailings from the Edgemont mill site
[near Pine Ridge in the southwest corner of South Dakota] washed into
the Cheyenne River." Three-and-one-half million tons of tailings lie on
the banks of Cottonwood Creek and the Cheyenne River as a result of
Uranium mining in the 1950s and 60s (Irvin 90–93).
In March 1980, WARN (Women of All Red Nations) "published a
privately researched report [on health problems on Pine Ridge Reservation] showing that radioactivity levels in Red Shirt subsurface water
tested at 15 picoCuries per liter (pCi/l). The Federal Safety Standard
is 5 (pCi/l)." A new well (to solve the problem) tested at 70 (pCi/l), 14
times the safety standard (Irvin 91). Health problems in this area
included "(1) a marked increase in spontaneous abortions [7 times the
national average–page 96]; (2) an increase in pregnancy complications;
(3) an increase in congenital defects traditionally unknown among the
Lakota (club foot, heart defects, and cleft palate); (4) infant respiratory
problems; (5) a high incidence of infant mortality, cancer, and
diabetes" (Irvin 91–92). The issue is urgent. Its seriousness is acknowledged in the film with the hope that the issue will insinuate itself into
the minds of a broad audience.
Powwow Highway also raises student consciousness about various
forms of stereotyping in standard media depictions of Indians. Two
scenes focus on the broken English spoken by Hollywood movie
Indians as they confronted manifest destiny, as if they were incapable
of language or civilization. The first scene shows a television advertisement for used Mustang and Pinto cars, with a non-Indian salesman
in full Indian headdress who says, "How, folks. This old cowboy is on
the warpath with heap big savings. All our choicest stock. Come on
down off the rez or the ranch and pick out your pony today." The ad
depicts Native Americans as easily exploitable: Anglo America has
appropriated Native American culture in naming its cars Cherokees and
Winnebagos and in wearing Native American headdress, and it now
wishes to sell back what it has appropriated—in used form. The second
scene occurs at the Hi-Fi electronics store, with an Anglo salesman’s
condescending remark to Philbert and Buddy: "No gettum special deal
on this one, chief." In both scenes white America is trying to sell
Native Americans a used or inferior product, as if it were especially
33
suited for them, using the broken English they will supposedly
understand as their own. However, the film’s intent is to dismiss, not
repeat such stereotypes. In line with the film’s revisionary humor, in
both scenes the broken English is put back into the mouths of media
people who originated and continue to perpetuate it. Instead of making
white males the protagonists who provide the audience with an entry
into Native American life, this film’s two white salesmen are depicted
as arrested in their development; they see twentieth-century Indians
only in terms of movie stereotypes about nineteenth-century ones.
Other revisions include the characterizations of the two protagonists
and the standard cowboy-Indian chase plot. Buddy and Philbert are
portrayed as superficially akin to standard media depictions of the
hostile savage and the noble savage only to revise those images.
Though Buddy is certainly hostile, his behavior and the way he is
treated by white society clearly show that he is not a twentieth-century
manifestation of, in Paula Gunn Allen’s words, the popular media view
of nineteenth-century "Indians as hostile savages who capture white
ladies and torture them, obstruct the westward movement of peaceable
white settlers, and engage in bloodthirsty uprisings in which they glory
in the massacre of innocent colonists and pioneers" (Sacred Hoop 5).
Buddy’s friendship with his sister’s white woman friend, Rabbit, and
Powwow Highway’s direct reversal of the old plot (epitomized in John
Ford’s The Searchers) contradict the first part of the stereotype: here
white males have captured an Indian woman and torture her by refusing
to release her to be with her children until after Christmas. Also,
Buddy’s efforts to stop Overdyne Mining Company from taking
remaining tribal resources without benefit to the reservation, his earlier
AIM efforts at Wounded Knee II and Ogalala, and his personal
problems because of the FBI’s persecution (arresting his sister to
remove him from the reservation before the tribal vote on the Overdyne
mining proposal), all explain his hostility and portray him as opposite
each aspect of the bloodthirsty-savage-attacking-innocent-white-settlers
stereotype.
And although Philbert shows a reverence for the earth and its
creatures, he is not, to use Allen’s definition of the currently popular
stereotype of the noble savage, "The appealing but doomed victim of
the inevitable evolution of humanity from primitive to postindustrial
social orders" (Sacred Hoop 4). More than a victim of European
invasion and industrial colonialization, and far from doomed, Philbert
acts on his traditional beliefs in order to deal with the contemporary
cowboys who have falsely jailed Buddy’s sister. Philbert’s trickster
story prepares us for a revised cowboy-Indian chase scene. When the
Sante Fe police, the FBI agents, and Sandy Youngblood all take seats
in police cars with the words "Let’s cowboy up. We got work to do,"
34
we are ready for Philbert to perform the role of trickster and, as he has
promised the trickster will do, to "play a little trick on the white man."
In the face of media stereotypes, Buddy and Philbert define
themselves: Buddy in terms of militant political activism that he has
both adapted from and uses to deal with white society, and Philbert by
the inherited ritual traditions of his tribe that he learned from his Uncle
Fred and uses to gain a tribal identity. They demonstrate that no two
Native Americans, even those from the same tribe, can be lumped
together as one type. They are, however, both Cheyenne warriors on
a parallel, if rarely merging, journey to Sante Fe and back. Disregarding the individual, the individualistic, hero of western literature,
Powwow Highway has dual protagonists to represent dual concerns, and
to show the need for each man to understand and work with the other.
The powwow they both attend, Philbert’s trickster story, and the film’s
final dream vision all show that the powwow highway they travel
together serves as a metaphor for the necessary continuance of both
tribal traditions and the political battle for Native American justice that
the two men represent. Against the backdrop of federally sponsored
economic exploitation and general apathy as well as reductive definitions of Native Americans, the film presents Native Americans defining
themselves and taking action against economic and cultural imperialism.
The film shows the powwow as a gathering place for Native
Americans of different tribes and differing lifestypes to come together
in friendly competition to gather strength and support from one another.
At the Pine Ridge powwow, which Buddy is reluctant to attend on the
premise that beads and feathers do not comprise a culture and that they
need to go directly to Sante Fe, he encounters Miller and his goons.
Buddy is saved—from both physical removal and a thrashing by
Miller’s goons—by the well-aimed knife of a fellow Vietnam vet, who
then tells Buddy to join in the dancing. Philbert, on the other hand, has
insisted that they attend the powwow, for he seeks a path of ritual
transformation that will put him in harmony with supernatural powers
and the earth, and his path involves recovering Cheyenne history and
traditions. As Philbert beats the sacred, animating drum, Buddy is
moved to dance within the interrelated circles of Native Americans. In
the character of the Vietnam vet, Buddy’s protest politics and Philbert’s
tribal consciousness merge to show the necessity of each. From these
powwow scenes, students come to understand the powwow as a return
to roots that provides a way to resolve contradictions in order to ensure
both physical and cultural survival.
The film shows how the oral storytelling tradition is an important
means to keep a culture alive. Philbert tells the story of Wihio the
trickster, over Buddy’s protest that it’s "too bad those stories don’t tell
us how to keep our reservations" or "our coal, our oil, our uranium,"
35
and receives Wolf Tooth’s praise that he "should be tribal historian."
But Philbert does not merely wish to reflect the story of the Vanishing
American; he seeks an alternative to it. Unlike Wihio, who foolishly
sought plums reflected in the river rather than the real ones hanging
right over his head, and thus "never did get any plums," in his role as
trickster Philbert makes use of whatever he finds right in front of him
(whether reflection or not) and gets exactly what he needs. Taking his
clue to rip out Bonnie’s jail cell window with a rope tied to his car
(Protector the War Pony) from the reflected television image of an old
William S. Hart cowboy movie, and retrieving Rabbit’s bail money and
Buddy’s bull purchasing money from the open jail vault he passes by,
Philbert allows them (at least momentarily) to escape one specific
instance of the political imprisonment, the forced removal from one
part of the country to another, and the economic hardship that reflect
the historical Native American experience. The trickster takes many
forms, sometimes mocking and imitating others, and always bringing
about change. In answer to Buddy’s protest politics, promising Buddy
that "the trickster will play a little trick on the white man," Philbert has
transformed traditional story into political action. Chief George, who
has come from Lame Deer to Sante Fe to find out what has kept Buddy
from his bull-purchasing task, is also involved in trickster efforts, as he
spills cattle onto the road to end the cowboy chase.
The dream visions that comprise much of the film provide Philbert,
and the film audience, with images of his Cheyenne ancestors.
Throughout the film, intercut visions disrupt the storytelling unities of
time, place, and action, to reflect the interconnectedness of past and
present. Toward the end of the film the final dream vision also reflects
the interconnectedness of vision and action. We share Buddy’s vision
of himself as a warrior with a tomahawk in hand, as he actually thwarts
the police chase by throwing the broken window of Philbert’s car at a
police car in chase. After Philbert has enacted the role of trickster to
rescue Bonnie from jail, Buddy envisions himself as an ancestral
warrior to help the group escape from the police. When the story ends
with Philbert, Buddy, Rabbit, and Bonnie and her children all walking
down the road together, students understand that political activism and
ritual tradition have become meaningful counterparts and that the
unfinished business of America’s native peoples involves both.
A vivid way to demonstrate to students the dual aspect of the
journey, a contemporary journey on traditional grounds, is to chart it on
a transparency map. From Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern
Cheyenne Reservation, we follow Buddy and Philbert to Sheridan,
Wyoming, where they stop at the electronics outlet; then down
Interstate 25 to its juncture with Interstate 90 where Philbert decides to
swerve to the east to visit the sacred mountain Noahvose or Bear Butte
36
("Sweet Butte" in the movie); then south and east to Pine Ridge, to
Wolf Tooth’s home and the powwow; then, resuming the journey to
Santa Fe, west on U.S. 18, jogging south to U.S. 20, and following
east along 20, stopping at Fort Robinson where the film intercuts the
1879 Cheyenne march through the snow after Dull Knife’s last fight
(Sandoz 276); then to the junction with Interstate 25 (again) and south
to the lunch stop at Wheatland, Wyoming, where Philbert tells his
trickster tale against the backdrop of the United States’ largest energy
plant belching smoke; then south, still on 25, to Denver and finally to
Santa Fe (Seals, TPH passim). Not coincidentally, we notice that this
route takes us over the traditional homeland of the Northern and
Southern Cheyenne.2
When we taught the film, it came in the second week of the Native
American section of the course. We had studied Ceremony during the
first week. Such a juxtaposition allows for several connections to be
explored. Both Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel and Jonathan Wacks’ film
show the trauma suffered by Native American veterans (by Tayo and
by Jimmy, Graham Greene’s character). Both allude to poisoning of the
environment with uranium, either through the development of the
atomic bomb or through mining. Both involve theft of Native American
land, in the fenced off ranch lands of Ceremony and in the allusion to
violated treaty rights as well as in the manipulations to exploit the
mineral resources of the reservation in Powwow Highway. Both allude
to a prominent Native American symbol for the creator of the universe
and spiritual sponsor, the spider: Ceremony begins with the poem about
Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, the spider; Powwow Highway shows
Philbert reverently saving the tarantula. Both depict the internecine
struggles of Native Americans. Both demonstrate the need for and
power of stories: Ceremony is the story of creating new and healing
stories, and Philbert assures Buddy that the old stories show us how to
live in the contemporary world. Finally, both works depict an extended
ceremony. Tayo goes to Betonie, who starts a process that extends over
many weeks. Philbert’s whole journey to become a worthy warrior is
a type of ceremony. Both works thus show that life should be a series
of ceremonies, ultimately, a continuous prayer. Trusting in that process
works—both for Tayo, the wounded and suffering hero of his people,
and for Philbert, the unlikely comic hero.
Notes
1
Robert DeNiro is producing a film about Wounded Knee II and
Leonard Peltier, and Robert Redford has funded a documentary about
Peltier (Seals, "Custerism" 638).
2
Enlarging by approximately 130% the pertinent portion of the United
37
States map from the 15½" by 11" State Farm Road Atlas (2–3) will
yield a scale about that of the map of the Cheyenne territory in Peter
J. Powell’s book (xxvii–xxix). If transparencies are used, the journey
can be outlined on the United States map, then the Cheyenne territory
map can be shown, and finally the one can be superimposed over the
other to graphically illustrate the nearly coterminous aspect of the
film’s journey and traditional Cheyenne territory.
Works Cited
Allen, Paula Gunn. "Grandmother." Rpt. in Fisher, 126.
———. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
Cornell, Stephen. The Return of the Native: American Indian Political
Resurgence. New York: Oxford, 1988.
Erdrich, Louise. "Dear John Wayne." Rpt. in Rereading America:
Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Ed. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. New York: St. Martin’s,
1989. 41–42.
Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United
States. Boston: Houghton, 1980.
Irvin, Amelia W. "Energy Development and the Effects of Mining on the
Lakota Nation." Journal of Ethnic Studies 10.1 (Spring 1982):
89–101.
Locker, James, dir. Frontline: The Spirit of Crazy Horse. Narr. Milo Yellow
Hair. Prod. Michel Dubois & Kevin McKiernan. 1990.
Lucas, Phil, and Robert Hagopian, dir. Images of Indians. Narr. Will
Sampson. KCTS Seattle Public Television, 1979.
Powell, Peter J. The Cheyennes: A Critical Bibliography. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1980.
Roos, Philip D., et al. "The Impact of the American Indian Movement on the
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation." Phylon 41.1 (March 1980):
89–99.
Sandoz, Mari. Cheyenne Autumn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953.
Seals, David. "The New Custerism." The Nation 13 May 1991:
634–39.
———. The Powwow Highway. 1979. New York: Plume, 1990.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
State Farm Insurance Company. State Farm Road Atlas: United States,
Mexico, Canada. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1984.
Sullivan, Elizabeth. "Legend of the Trail of Tears." Rpt. in Fisher. 26–30.
Wacks, Jonathan, dir. Powwow Highway. With A Martinez and Gary Farmer.
Hand-Made Films, 1987.
38
COMMENTARY
From the Secretary-Treasurer
Current SAIL subscribers may recall from the announcement in SAIL
3.1 that the Association for Studies in American Indian Literatures
(ASAIL) will be incorporated with a dues-paying membership beginning January 1, 1992. Membership in the Association is open to all
individuals and institutions interested in furthering the goals of the
Association. Rates are:
Individual membership: $25
Institutional membership: $35
Limited income membership: $16
Sponsor: $50
Patron: $100
Benefits of ASAIL membership will include a subscription to SAIL, a
subscription to the newsletter ASAIL Notes, and special rates at
conferences sponsored by the Association; donations at the Sponsor and
Patron levels will be acknowledged in the concurrent volume of SAIL.
As a result of this change in the status of the Association, we
anticipate that subscribers to Volume 4 of the journal will typically be
dues-paying Association members. Those wishing to subscribe to the
journal without becoming members of the Association may contact Bob
Nelson, SAIL, Box 112, University of Richmond VA 23173 for 1992
rates.
In order to help control mailing costs within the organization, we
urge all potential 1992 ASAIL members and SAIL subscribers to
join/resubscribe as early as possible. Dues received prior to January
1992 will be credited towards 1992 membership. We also encourage all
to attend the ASAIL business meeting at MLA and cast their votes for
the next President, Secretary, and Treasurer of ASAIL.
Elizabeth H. McDade
From the Editors
One of the pleasures of this column is the opportunity to acknowledge contributions to the continued publication of SAIL. This time the
pleasure is mixed: our editorial assistant at Fullerton, Sharon Dilloway,
is leaving us, and her presence and gifts will be much missed. Sharon
first offered her services to SAIL in the fall of 1989, and since then has
worked many hours each week with unfailing generosity, reliability and
good humor: she has managed the book review cycle, tended to correspondence, formatted and distributed hundreds of information sheets at
conferences, made her way through the CSUF Foundation bureaucracy,
and (very important) listened with a sympathetic ear—all for the sole
compensation of a campus parking pass. SAIL would not have been
possible without Sharon, and on behalf of all our readers as well as
myself, I extend our thanks to her and best wishes on her future
projects.
39
After two issues focused on special topics, classical oral literatures
in translation and teaching American Indian literature, we are pleased
to present a highly eclectic collection of papers. William Clements’
lucid and astute analysis of translations from Zuni will be welcomed by
both seasoned critics of American Indian literatures and newcomers to
the field, while the interview with Luci Tapahonso explores important
themes for a writer who is gaining wider recognition. The views put
forward by the five contributors to the discussion of Powwow Highway
represent widely varied approaches and positions as well as a first for
SAIL: much-needed analysis of media "texts." We invite readers to join
in this symposium with your experiences and critiques of this film—and
your views of other texts, including SAIL.
This issue goes to press in early summer, and we are already
planning for next year’s Volume Four. Several projects for 1992 are
noted in the announcements below: we call attention especially to a new
special issue on creative work.
Another SAIL project for 1992 is support of "Returning the Gift,"
a gathering of Native North American writers for workshops, celebrations, networking and performance. SAIL is submitting a proposal to the
National Endowment for the Arts to fund a special issue devoted to
conference proceedings; this grant requires matching funds, and we are
offering our readers an opportunity to participate in the endeavor by
becoming or finding supporting patrons for it.
We welcome additional suggestions and submissions from readers.
SAIL belongs to its readers and subscribers; please tell us what you
think.
Helen Jaskoski
Robert M. Nelson
*
*
*
*
1992 Continued
We received one response to our query in the spring 1991 issue
about the response of SAIL to the 1992 anniversary. Joe Bruchac
forwarded the results of a survey undertaken by Cornell University; the
preliminary results are reprinted here.
Since April, 1989, Cornell University’s American Indian Program
has supervised a survey of American Indian opinion leaders, community chiefs, college program directors and assorted other individuals
on their responses to the upcoming 1992 Columbus Quincentenary. We
disseminated a survey hemispherically to some 700 potential respondents, eliciting 74 responses thus far. As part of the same project, some
two dozen oral interviews were conducted with North American Indian
opinion leaders. The preliminary results from this research are offered
here as a way of establishing an information base on the American
40
Indigenous perception of this hemispheric event.
The 500th anniversary of contact between European and American
cultures in 1992 will provide a rare hemispheric opportunity to review
the history as well as the contemporary social conditions of American
Indian peoples. This is the principal message and concern of Indian
respondents to the survey. The second concern—that Indian perspectives would be drowned out once again.
Respondents expressed a range of opinions to most of nine basic
questions in the questionnaire, and were most uniform in having a
negative idea of "celebrating" the event. The Assembly of First
Nations, a national Canadian Indian organization, conveyed a formal
resolution stating "For the First Nations to celebrate the near destruction of our culture and identity would be insane." "October 12, 1492,"
wrote a Mohawk elder, "is the date when the Dark Ages descended on
the Indians of America."
Facing a choice of five answers to the question, "In what way would
you characterize the Quincentenary?," 70% of respondents described
it either as 500 years of Native People’s resistance to colonization, or
as an anniversary of a holocaust, while 20% described it as a commemoration of a cultural encounter, and only 6% as a celebration of
discovery. Sixty-four percent consider the Quincentenary a unique
historical event, 74% see it as an opportunity, while 15% would ignore
it. In terms of activities to commemorate the event, 78% chose
educational conferences and festivals as opposed to the 19% who
preferred protests and legal actions. Personal participation was
predicated on the goals of: public education about Native issues–43%,
advancing legislation to protect Native rights–27%, increasing
communications networks–20%, and demands of public apologies from
Western states and churches–3%.
Respondents stressed the importance of not shying away from
reviewing the realities imposed by the clash of cultures and by the
wars, diseases and accommodations of American hemispheric history.
While there was suspicion expressed at the term "cultural encounter"
as euphemistic, there was outright hostility at the concept of "discovery." "How can it be a discovery if we were already here?" wrote
an Abenaki man. The overarching mandate is to give adequate response
from the Indian perspective. "We owe it to our ancestors to tell their
story," writes Dianne Longboat, Coordinator of Indian Health Careers
Program at Six Nations Reserve, in Ontario. And to Beatriz Painquco,
Mapuche Indian from Chile, the Quincentenary "is an opportunity to
publicly expose our vision and to put our voices together." Indian
author N. Scott Momaday had this to say: "I have very mixed feelings
about celebrating this event . . . but at the same time, the Indian has
just as much right to celebrate the occasion as anyone else. If the
Indian excludes himself from it, that’s a negative thing. If he can find
a way to celebrate it on a real basis, that’s positive . . . he stands to
teach the rest of the world something." And Tewa anthropologist,
41
Alfonso Ortiz: "Mutual assessment would be the best thing to do and
there is no one else whom to bounce questions off of except the
indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere . . . I say that the U.S.
Indian should take the lead because we’ve got the intellectual resources."
The Quincentenary events that culminate (and germinate) in 1992
mark a decisive moment in the history of American Indian peoples.
1992 is generally seen by Indians as a moment in time when consciousness about the Indian history of the American continent and public
recognition of Indian communities’ continued existence in the contemporary world could be presented to a substantial audience.
Call for Creative Work
We are seeking submissions—previously unpublished poetry, short
fiction, drama, essay, autobiography—for a special issue in 1992 on
new creative work. SAIL’s new, larger format, made possible by the
increase in our subscriber list during the past two years, should enable
us to publish more prose than we were able to print in the last creative
issue. Poets, fiction writers, autobiographers, playwrights, essayists: we
welcome your submissions, and hope you will also pass our invitation
on to other Native American authors who may want to submit their
work.
We project publication for the winter issue of 1992; deadline is 1
February 1992. Please send submissions, typed and double-spaced, with
SASE for return of work, to Helen Jaskoski, Department of English,
California State University, Fullerton, CA 92634.
Update on "Returning the Gift"
As we go to press Joe Bruchac has announced that the University
of Oklahoma is co-sponsoring this festival of Native North American
writers. Additional funding has also been received from the Bay
Foundation, and other grant sources are being pursued. Writers
interested in participating are encouraged to contact Barbara Hobson,
address at the end of this announcement.
What: A four-day literary event for North American writers (fiction and
non-fiction writers, poets, playwrights and literary critics) of Native
(American Indian) descent. The first two days will be exclusively for
the Native writers themselves. The third day will bring in non-Native
supporters of Native writing, including critics, publishers, and teachers
of Native American literature. The fourth day will be open to the
general public. The agenda for the festival will include writing
workshops, panel discussions, seminars, working sessions, readings and
performances.
When: July 8th–11th, 1992
42
Where: Oklahoma Center for Continuing Education
The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Who: Literary writers of North American Native descent, including
writers of American Indian, Inuit (Eskimo), and Aleut ancestry, from
Canda, the United States, Mexico and Central America. Approximately
80 recognized Native writers will be invited to attend with all travel and
other expenses paid and an equal honorarium of $600 each. These
already published writers will each take part in one workshop, panel
discussion, or seminar and give a public reading of their work. They
will also serve as mentors for an additional 80 Native writers who are
at the start of their careers. These additional "apprentice" writers will
also attend the conference free of charge and be provided with room,
board and transportation expenses. The total number of Native writers
attending, mentor and apprentice, will be approximately 160.
Project Coordinator: Barbara Hobson, University of Oklahoma,
Department of English—Room 113, 760 Van Vleet Oval, Norman, OK
73019; phone 405-329-7729 or 405-325-6277.
Opportunity for Benefactors
Readers and subscribers of SAIL are invited to become benefactors
for the special issue of SAIL that will publish proceedings of the
"Returning the Gift" conference. The proceedings will include
symposium transcripts, position papers, creative work in fiction,
poetry, drama and non-fiction prose. We hope to upgrade our production with photographs and offset printing, to provide the best medium
possible for this important publication. This issue of SAIL is expected
to set the agenda for Native North American contributions to literature
and literary study for the opening of the next century. We invite you
to become a part of this important undertaking by contributing as a
benefactor to the initiative. We have made a grant proposal to the
National Endowment for the Arts to support the project; to be eligible
for the grant, we must raise a minimum of $2000 in matching funds.
We hope to find at least 20 people who can be generous enough to
make donations of $100 to SAIL for this special issue. If you can
contribute, we welcome your gift. If you are able to help other
benefactors reach us, we hope you will do so. Contributions of all
benefactors will be recognized in the issue.
Checks should be made to SAIL/1992 and sent to Helen Jaskoski,
Department of English, California State University, Fullerton, CA
92634.
Invitation to Reviewers
SAIL receives many books for review, and publishers pay attention
to what SAIL reviewers say. We try to assign reviews on the basis of
what we know, or sometimes guess, about a potential reviewer’s
43
expertise and preferences. We are especially in need of people who can
review translations and dual-language texts, but we welcome reviewers
in all areas of literature and scholarship. If you would like to review
books and/or media materials for SAIL, please send us a letter
informing us of your areas of expertise and interest; include a resume
or curriculum vitae if you have one. Send materials to Helen Jaskoski,
Department of English, California State University, Fullerton, CA
92634.
Directory of American Indian Writers
A directory of Native North American Indian Writers is being
compiled in connection with "Returning the Gift." Writers are invited
to submit information to be listed in the directory. Publication is
projected for spring 1992; writers should submit entries as soon as
possible. For more information, contact Barbara Hobson, University of
Oklahoma, Department of English—Room 113, 760 Van Vleet Oval,
Norman, OK 73019; phone 405-329-7729 or 405-325-6277.
AICA Tour
The American Indian Contemporay Arts Gallery, 685 Market St.
(Monadnock Bldg., 2nd Floor), San Francisco, will host a tour of their
exhibit of Native art during the December MLA Convention. Sara
Bates, Curator of the AICA, will lead the tour. All ASAIL and MLA
members are invited to attend. Tours will be held on both December
27 and 28 at 5 p.m. Contact Sara Bates at [415] 495-7600 or Larry
Abbott at [802] 273-2663 for more information.
*
*
*
44
*
REVIEWS
American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review,
and Selected Bibliography. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff. New York:
Modern Language Association of America, 1990. 308 pp. ISBN 087352-192-7.
The first thing likely to strike the reader upon opening LaVonne
Ruoff’s new volume is the range, variety, and richness of American
Indian literatures. The reader who has just recently approached the
subject, the book’s target audience, should get this impression
especially. This work is a comprehensive examination of the subject,
intended as an aid to teachers and students who are not aware of the
contributions of American Indians to American literary history. But it
goes beyond that.
Organized logically into three major sections, American Indian
Literatures begins with a discussion of the history of Native Americans
living in what is now the United States from the time of first contact to
the present. While necessarily brief, this essay provides a good
overview that is supplemented by a list of important dates in American
Indian history from 1500 to the present. The remainder of Part One is
devoted to an extensive discussion of genres and major figures.
Appropriately enough, Ruoff’s remarks begin with an examination
of oral literatures, including chants, ceremonies, songs, rituals,
narratives, and oratory. In addition to the discussion of various genres
and their roles in Native cultures, the author cites problems of textual
transmission, gives examples of representative types (e.g., trickster
tales, creation myths), and mentions important scholarly works. Ruoff
then turns to autobiography and life histories, discussing major
examples of these, including works by William Apes, Charles Eastman,
George Copway, John Joseph Mathews, and N. Scott Momaday. This
section is followed by a history of written literatures that traces the
development of imaginative writing and other forms in English. Here,
the material is divided into three chronological periods, beginning with
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, followed by the 1900s to 1967,
and ending with the period since 1968. The early period includes
information on sermons, protest literature, tribal histories, and travel
accounts; starting with Samson Occom’s work in the eighteenth
century, the section continues with nineteenth century writers such as
John Rollin Ridge and the only writer from Canada who is treated
extensively, E. Pauline Johnson. Native writing in the earlier part of
the twentieth century is examined next. Here, Ruoff traces some major
figures who were writing poetry, fiction, and drama—Alexander Posey,
Will Rogers, D’Arcy McNickle, John Oskison, and Lynn Riggs are
examples—but she includes less known figures as well. The discussion
of contemporary literature is, appropriately, the largest. Major figures
are treated at some length; the works of Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise
45
Erdrich, James Welch, and other writers receive significant attention.
But here again, Ruoff is careful to call attention to other important, if
lesser known figures.
Part Two is a bibliographic review. This essay identifies and
comments on research materials available to students of American
Indian literatures, including bibliographies and guides to research. It
also looks at collections and anthologies, scholarship and criticism,
author studies, sources of background information, and teaching aids.
The arrangement of the review is helpful, especially to the newcomer,
as it follows the same general structure as Part One. The review also
identifies works that are concerned with specific topics, such as
ethnohistory, women’s studies, and the image of the Indian. This
topical breakdown should be welcome to students approaching the
subject for the first time.
In the third part of her work, Ruoff provides an extensive selected
bibliography arranged in sections. Here, the standard categories
appear—bibliographies, anthologies, criticism and scholarship, and
author studies—but the compiler also includes sections on teaching
American Indian literatures, background studies, and films and
videotapes. Part Three is followed by a list of important dates and an
index of persons, organizations, important bills and acts, and some
topics. The index seems to complement the selected bibliography well.
American Indian Literatures is well conceived and well executed. It
will be welcomed by students and teachers who are approaching the
subject for the first time. But this work is more than an aid to this
audience; it serves as a general guide to the field, one which will find
extensive use among seasoned scholars. Ruoff’s work is important in
that it shows the variety and range of the study of Native literatures as
well as chronicles the growth in this area since the late 1960s. It is also
revealing because it demonstrates the need for basic scholarship in
many areas of the field. While some important things have been done,
including this fine work, LaVonne Ruoff has made it clear that much
more abides.
James W. Parins
*
*
*
*
Wolverine Myths and Visions: Dene Traditions from Northern
Alberta. Compiled by the Dene Wodih Society. Ed. Patrick Moore and
Angela Wheelock. xxv, 259 pp. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P,
1990; ISBN 0-8032-8161-7. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, ISBN 088864-148-6.
The members of the Dene Wodih Society (along with the editors)
are to be congratulated on the recently published collection of tradition46
al Slave texts from northwestern Alberta, Wolverine Myths and Visions.
Their book is a most valuable contribution to the growing body of texts
printed in the indigenous languages of Canada. It is an essential aspect
of this book that it presents both the original Slave texts and a free
translation into English—even though the latter is unaccountably titled
"English Texts [sic]." Welcome for its traditional myths, this volume
is extraordinary for the inclusion of prophetic texts of the transitional
period.
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of this book is the fact that it
results from a communal effort by the Dene Wodih Society of
Assumption, Alberta, supported by their Band, an Oblate priest,
various academics and, ultimately, the Yukon Native Languages
Centre. Among the Dene Dháa of northwestern Alberta, the Slave
language is still spoken by children of all ages, and children were
amongst the original audience for all but one of these texts (no. 12).
The texts are mainly in the Xewónht’e dialect of Assumption and
Habay (with texts 4 and 7 told in the Kegúnht’u dialect typical of the
adjacent North West Territories); they are printed in a practical
orthography.
The narrators are named in the preface, and their names deserve to
be repeated here: Louison Ahkimnatchie, Elisse Ahnassay, Willie
Ahnassay, Sr., Willie Denechoan, Harry Dahdona, Alexis Seniantha,
Emile Sutha, Jean Marie Talley. It is remarkable that none of these
authors—nor, indeed, the Dene Wodih Society as the collective
translators—should have been included in any form in the all-important
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry of the Library of Congress.
The book includes three useful maps and is embellished with
watercolours (and some pencil drawings?—the reproductions are blackand-white, and the medium is left unidentified) in a largely naturalistic
manner by Dia Ahnassay Thurston, whose name echoes that of the
chief translator, the late George Ahnassay, to whose inspiration we owe
this splendid volume.
The texts themselves are of the greatest literary, ethnological and
historical (and, of course, linguistic) interest; any attempt to summarise
either the "Traditional Stories" or the "Accounts of the Prophet Nógha"
would not only be futile but risk offending against the proprieties which
the editors invoke so eloquently at the end of their introduction.
The substance of the book is divided into twice two parts: first (1),
the free translation, then (2) the original texts with their interlinear
translation; each of these in turn consisting of ten myths (a) and five
accounts of the prophet and his prophecies (b). The preface (ix) and a
general introduction (xi–xxv) are supplemented, somewhat asymmetrically, by a special "Introduction to the Dene Prophets" (59–70)
preceding the free translation of part 1b, and by a survey of "The Dene
Dháh (Alberta Slave) Alphabet" (89–101) appearing a bit unmoored at
the head of Part 2.
The introduction outlines the provenance of the texts and the settings
47
in which they were told; it also provides geographical and historical
background. Its most important section is a survey of genres, followed
by all too brief remarks on performance. The editors bravely address
the thorny question of prose vs poetic presentation of orally performed
texts and conclude in favour of the former, explicitly deferring to their
Slave translators who "were not comfortable with the extent of analysis
used by translators such as Hymes, except for narratives which are
specially structured, such as prayers" (xxiv).
The ad hoc introduction to the prophetic texts contains ethnographic
and historical information of considerable interest along with some
corroborating comments from the ethnological literature. On a few
occasions in Part 1 (the free translations), comments of a pragmatic
nature are given in footnotes, but the editors make a virtue of the fact
that "notes are used sparingly" lest they "violate the protocol"
prohibiting "extensive analysis of written stories by academics" (xxv).
That there should be only three footnotes to accompany the 154 pages
of original Slave text with its interlinear translation—not exactly an
inviting format in any case, despite its surpassing value—is a matter of
regret. But who would argue with editors who evidently have striven
with some success to acquire the "fine sense of etiquette concerning
traditional narratives and elders" (xxv) of the Dene Dháa.
It might well be a question of propriety, then, which lies at the root
of the most puzzling omission: that none of the 15 texts is ascribed to
a particular teller even though all eight are listed in the preface (and
some might be identified on the basis of internal evidence provided in
the texts themselves). Whatever the reason for this decision, it is not
only subverted by the attribution of quotations (e.g., xvi) but also seems
to be in conflict with the traditional practice which is explicitly
enunciated as follows: "Dene storytellers usually start by naming the
people who told them the stories" (xvi).
Respect for the texts and their tellers might also have dictated
another printing of the Slave originals, unencumbered by the interlinear
translation; in a situation where the language is widely spoken by
children and in a book intended at least in part for use in the schools,
such a running text is of prime paedagogical importance.1 It is curious,
finally, that a collection of texts recorded and printed in the Slave
language should be published under a title that is monolingually
English.
These texts raise issues of a philological and editorial nature which
may be less than obvious to the literary reader even though they form
an integral part of the book, and hence of this review. (In some
journals, such comments would be set in smaller type.)
Where Does a Text Begin and End? It is an intriguing feature of this
book that the prefatory remarks preceding texts 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 (and,
remarkably, none of the prophetic texts) are set in small italics while
the appendices which follow texts 1, 2, 7, 9 appear in ordinary type
and are subheaded "Storyteller’s Commentary." Do these typographical
48
conventions signal a distinction in the status of these materials?
There is no discussion of the prosodic or proxemic or other
(textual?) diagnostics which led the translators and editors to identify
certain sections of the text as exordium or epilogue,2 and there are
certainly some opening paragraphs which, to this non-Athapaskanist
reader, seem plausible candidates for proemial status even though they
are printed in ordinary type:
Yes, long ago when I was a child Grandmother told me this
story. (text 10, page 49)
My Grandmother told me about Wolverine long ago when
I was a child. "Grandmother, tell me a story," I said, and
she spoke with me. (text 8, page 40)
I know the stories in so many ways. Long ago people told
about this. (text 2, page 7; cf. text 1, and note also that this
paragraph in text 2 is preceded by a section printed in small
italics)
With fifteen texts told by eight narrators, this is one of the points where
it would be important to know the identity of the narrator—if only in
code.
The question of narrative status also applies to the rhetorical
questions or explanatory asides presented as parenthetical insertions (as
in text 3, page 16):
He fed the baby fat mixed with animal brains, and in that
way he cared for his son. (Well, in those days where would
you find a store? They didn’t exist.) The man went along
carrying the baby, [ . . .]
Are such anachronistic asides, spoken directly across the proscenium,
as it were, not analogous in status to the matter preceding or following
the text in the narrow sense?
Finally, there is the more general question: Were these texts told in
isolation, or do they form part of a larger set, perhaps a cycle? This
edition contains only the tantalising remark that "Most of these
narratives were told with [sic] several other stories, [. . .]" (xxi).
How Are the Texts Structured? In many instances the paragraphs of
the free English translation do not match those indicated in the original
Slave texts. Such discrepancies occur both in the myths and the
prophetic texts (e.g., text 12, pages 219, 72). In text 8, the free
translation (41) shows a paragraph before Wolverine meets his end:
free: ¶ And so Wolverine sat down by the fire, lifted his
breechcloth, [. . .]
while none appears in the Slave text (181):
Detthoné xónla, [. . .]
i-l:
His-[Wolverine’s]-breechcloth like-this-he-did-[lifted]
Conversely a paragraph may be indicated in the Slave text (no. 5, page
49
147):
¶ Nóghe éhsán "t’ong" wodi [. . .]
¶ Wolverine then [spraying-sound] he-makes-sound[Skunk]
but not in the running translation (24):
free: He raised his tail and was ready to spray. "T’ong!" The
spraying sound was already coming from Skunk’s spray
hole, [. . .]
There is no discussion of what linguistic or discourse features the
paragraphs might reflect.
Free Translation or Re-telling? Inconsistencies in paragraphing
aside, there are analogous discrepancies between original text and free
translation with regard to parenthetical insertions—and, perhaps, also
with respect to the translation itself (text 8, pages 123, 13):
"[. . .] Sehndadzíin at’in," kudi éhsán; mbetsóné éhsán
at’in. Ye gha dene andat’ính úh sóon?
i-l:
"[. . .] My-son-in-law it-was," she thought then; herfeces then it-was. What for person appear-to-be and
then?
free: "It must be my son-in-law [. . .]," [she] thought [. . .].
(However, the man who appeared to her each night was
really a product of her own imagination.)
A close comparison of these two passages and their context suggests
that the "free translation" might, in fact, better be interpreted as a retelling, a paraphrase.
In another instance (text 9, pages 116, 9), the "free translation"
appears simply to omit the questioning aside,
(Góon xéwondeh éhsín? Nóghe nelin.)
i-l:
(Question you-do-like-that maybe? Wolverine you-are.)
in its entirety.
The translation of words which may be taboo (or offensive, or at
least highly marked) in one or both of the languages in question is an
especially thorny problem.3 The two translations match sometimes but
not always (text 8, pages 180, 40; 181, 41):
Yebé t’á eledz [. . .]
i-l:
Its-stomach in he-[Wolverine]-would-urinate [. . .]
free: He urinated into the stomach of [one of the beavers, . . .]
[. . .], gitl’éh eghendihdi ínyá.
i-l:
[. . .], in-his-crotch they-shoved-it and-then.
free: [. . .], and then shoved it between Wolverine’s legs.
In some cases, the gulf widens (text 5, pages 147, 24; text 2, pages
116, 9):
¶ Nóghe éhsán "t’ong" wodi
i-l:
50
i elé éhsán, yetsónék’é éhsán,
xónht’e éhsán yígé.
i-l:
¶ Wolverine then [spraying-sound] he-makes-sound[Skunk]
that where-he-urinates it-must-have-been, his-anus then,
like-that then he-bit.
free: The spraying sound was already coming from Skunk’s spray
hole, when Wolverine bit it shut.
Xoniá dúhde se’e detl’eh ts’ín.
(Góon xéwondeh éhsín? Nóghe nelin.)
Jon se’e detl’eh ts’íb éhsán.
Kón, mbéhts’ehtthenlih, [. . .]
i-l:
Suddenly right-here really her-crotch toward.
(Question you-do-like-that maybe? Wolverine you-are.)
Here really her-crotch toward then.
Fire, with-it’s-struck, [. . .]
free: [. . .], at last finding a small flint between her legs,
tied right there, high on her thigh.
(As noted earlier, the insertion does not appear in the free translation.)
Such passages are inherently problematic in any cross-cultural situation.
But even in non-controversial areas, the distance between the
interlinear and the free translation seems to be substantial. In the
following example (text 1, pages 102, 3), the free translation simply
seems to omit all repetition, whether only of the noun meaning
"animal" or of the whole phrase:
Wonlin nde-áh, wonlin ni’á di díeh k’eh lint’onh.
Wonlin, wonlin, ndáhtheghon, wonlin nechi, lint’onh.
i-l:
Animals He-tricks, animals He-tricked this land on all.
Animals, animals, He-killed-them, animals giant, all.
free: He tricked all the animals that lived on this land;
he killed all the giant animals.
It seems worth inquiring about the stylistic value of such repetitions.
Such discrepancies raise serious questions about the nature of the
free translations presented in the first half of this book. That the
interlinear translations can, in the nature of things, be little more than
rough approximations goes without saying. But to what extent have the
free translations been rewritten and smoothed over? If they were as far
removed, in general, from the original as these few instances suggest,
we might have to reconsider the border which divides free translation
from paraphrase, summary or, indeed, re-telling.4
Notes
1
While linguists and philologists have an abiding interest in variants, slips
of the tongue, false starts, insertions, textual notes, glossaries, etc., these
seem of little concern to most fluent speakers (and may for some be a
51
source of irritation); but a running text, unimpeded by interlinear matter
(or even by a translation printed en regard), is essential. (On this point cf.
especially pp. 106–107 in my review article, "Ojibwa Texts," International
Journal of American Linguistics 53: 103–111, 1987.)
2
There is also no mention of the reason for dividing text 5 into two parts.
3
For a more general discussion of this issue à propos of traditional Cree
texts, cf. my "Taboo and Taste in Literary Translation," W. Cowan, réd.,
Actes du Dix-septième Congrès des Algonquinistes 377–394, 1986.
4
Postscript to the Publishers: This book exhibits a number of editorial flaws
which should clearly be laid at the feet of the publishers and their shoddy
copy-editing (if any); the following examples are intended as representative, not exhaustive:
— place-names like Bushie River or High Level which are discussed on
page 94 but do not appear on the facing map;
— variable spellings of the name Slave which are not accounted for by
Rice’s convention (96n);
— infelicities in the introductory matter (e.g., C. Marten [65] for what can
only be see Marten, or the gratuitous awkwardness of using revealed
[90] as a phonological term in a book of prophetic texts);
— the omission from the bibliography of many titles referred to in the
body (e.g., Howard 1963, Moses 1972, Rice 1983, Voudrach 1965);
— the omission of subtitles for Preston 1971 (which is cited in the form
of an unpublished dissertation even though it was published in 1975,
and with a changed subtitle) or Ridington 1978;
— the obliteration of several lines of text by an illustration on page 41.
In a book of lasting importance, such lack of ordinary editorial care insults
authors and readers alike.
H. C. Wolfart
*
*
*
*
California Indian Nights. Compiled by Edward W. Gifford and
Gwendoline Harris Block. Introduction by Albert L. Hurtado. Lincoln
and London: U of Nebraska P, 1990. 323 pp. $9.95 paper, ISBN
0-8032-7031-3.
In 1930 Edward W. Gifford and Gwendoline Harris Block published
California Indian Nights Entertainment, an anthology of over eighty
California Indian stories. Gifford and Block, both scholars of California
Indian cultures, selected and adapted the stories from various publications, such as the University of California Publications in American
Archaeology and Ethnography and the Journal of American Folklore,
where the stories collected from the California natives by anthropologists first appeared in print. Now, sixty years later, Bison has reissued
52
the anthology with the same stories and introduction by Gifford and
Block and with a new introduction by historian Albert L. Hurtado.
Gifford and Block include stories from many of the over one
hundred California Indian tribes. As a result, the reader can begin to
appreciate, or at least be reminded of, the many Native peoples who
populated all regions of California. Gifford and Block not only identify
the tribe from which each story comes but also the county in which the
tribe lives, or lived at the time the respective story was originally
collected. Thus, we have stories from the Hupa, Karok, and Wiyot
Indians of Humboldt county in northern California as well as stories
from the Juaneño and Luiseño Indians of Orange, Riverside, and San
Diego counties in southern California.
The stories are presented in English, edited by Gifford and Block,
as Hurtado notes, "to give them broader appeal without unduly
damaging their authenticity." The sparsity of human motivation and
narrative detail characteristic of these stories is typical of much oral
literature of tribal cultures in translation and is oftentimes problematic
for Western readers with certain narrative expectations. Also, the
ambiguous nature of characters, such as Coyote, in many of the stories
may prove confusing, contradictory to these same readers.
In the Karok story, "How Coyote Got His Cunning," Coyote is both
foolish and wise, and, as demonstrated by his actions, possessed
cunning, or a certain amount of it anyway, before he obtained it in the
story. In many of these stories people, even in the form of animals, and
features of the landscape are already in existence and may be characters
themselves and may or may not be remade by the actions of the
principal character(s) in the stories. Unlike the Christian version of
creation, which is linear and definitive, the creation as portrayed in
many of these stories is dialogical, ongoing, perplexing. Good
intentions or deeds may bring about an unfortunate outcome, and vice
versa. In "Chipmunk, The Giant-Killer," a central Miwok story, the
characters are saved by the same tactics their enemies used against
them.
These features of the stories and their oftentimes unique formats,
where stories seem to open and close arbitrarily, while perhaps
disconcerting to some readers, do not make for uneasy or inaccessible
reading. The stories are fun, often very humorous, and any difficulty
with them should point to, and raise questions about, the differences
between the reader’s expectations of a narrative and what the stories
present.
It is the question of the reader, specifically, that prompts a more
critical examination of this anthology. While the stories and Gifford and
Block’s introduction are the same, a reader today is likely to be quite
different from the reader in 1930. Certainly readers today will have
questions about the stories, if not about their translation and production
then about the cultures from which they come and how they work or
function in those cultures. Hurtado notes that "A much more detailed
53
picture of Indian history has emerged since this book was first
published." (Hurtado has written a comprehensive history of California
Indian history, Indian Survival on the California Borderland Frontier,
1819–60, which covers the periods of Spanish, Mexican, and American
invasion.) Yet Hurtado is not aware of, or fails to acknowledge, the
questions that inform current study in the fields of anthropology and
folklore, specifically those questions dealing with the translation and
presentation of oral materials from persons of one culture by persons
from another, usually dominant, culture.
Contemporary readers are likely to question the context in which the
stories were first told to recorder-editors and the nature of the
translation from the Native language into English. What were the
circumstances of a Native Californian telling an anthropologist a story?
How might those circumstances have affected the narrative form and
meaning of the story? What is lost or gained in the translation from one
language to another? These questions suggest a wider, more complex
understanding of and appreciation for the stories.
Among my own Pomo and Coast Miwok people I have seen how
storytellers will alter narratives, both in terms of content and form, for
ethnographers and linguists. Essie Parrish, for example, used formal
frames to open and close the stories she told Robert Oswalt for his
Kashaya Texts. She customarily opened by saying "This is a story of"
or "Now I am going to talk about" and closed with "This is the end of
that." I have never heard Mrs. Parrish or any other Kashaya Pomo use
formal frames when telling a story or anything else. The point here is
that the texts in California Indian Nights are not raw, authentic stories
that, as Hurtado suggests, "illuminate Indian culture and history." The
stories are bicultural products that may, as a result of certain narrative
forms or whatever, raise questions not only about the rich and varied
California Indian cultures and histories, but also about the nature of
those cultures and histories as they are recorded, translated, and
presented by anthropologists and the like.
Rather than explore these questions, Gifford and Block, typical of
anthropologists of their day, closed discussion of them with definitive
descriptions of the Native cultures. In their lengthy introduction to the
anthology, Gifford and Block provide a general ethnography that
purports to describe the cultures of northwestern, central, and southern
California in order that readers have a wider sense of, or a context for,
the stories. Readers learn, for example, that in northwestern California
"there were no chiefs" while "everywhere else in California there were
chiefs." Whether or not readers find this material interesting the
material serves only to frame the stories in given ways, and ultimately
says as much about Gifford and Block as it does the California Indians
they are describing.
Gifford and Block continually assess the Indian cultures in terms of
their own. Hence, they note "musical instruments were but poorly
developed" and that "the southern California creation story which began
54
with a void is the most logical. . . . So, from a logical standpoint, it
was the Luiseño of southern California, with their void, who had gone
the farthest and had reasoned the origin of the matter back to nothingness, and who had realized the significance of maleness and femaleness
as creative principles." Further, Gifford and Block say nothing about
their decisions to divide the stories categorically in given ways (i.e.,
Coyote Stories, Star Stories, Adventure Stories, Miscellaneous).
Hurtado, in his introduction, notes a few of Gifford and Block’s
biases, or what he calls "idiosyncracies," such as their use of the word
primitive and their oversight of "the exceedingly fine basketry that was
found throughout the state." Unfortunately, he condones, perhaps
unwittingly, the essentially ethnocentric nature of Gifford and Block’s
introduction by saying: "Understandably, in the ensuing sixty years
there have been advances in the field, but on the whole their [Gifford
and Block’s] introduction still stands up."
Gifford and Block observe: "A good narrator clothes that [narrative]
skeleton with flesh, and employs the literary devices known to his
people." Anyone would agree. But from their introduction we learn
nothing of the literary devices used by the Indian narrators, with other
Indians or with outside recorder-editors, and nothing of the ways the
English translation, which has reduced over one hundred distinct
languages to a common denominator, may or may not have compromised those devices. The narrative forms of the stories may be
unique and perplexing and the motifs different from those in Western
narratives, but how are they understood and meaningful to the
respective Indian narrators and their communities? I doubt many of
these Indians discuss their stories in terms of Western narratives, say
in contrast to linear Christian versions of creation. For Western readers
a comparative/contrastive approach may be a starting point, but the
readers must again be cognizant of the likely culture specific terms of
their approach. After all, Gifford and Block compare and contrast.
I mention this, in fact I have spent so much time talking about
Gifford and Block’s introduction and Hurtado’s introduction, because
together the introductions not only frame the stories in given ways but
do little, if anything, to raise crucial questions about the stories and
their production, so that they might be seen as something more than
voiceless relics that are understood from only one cultural perspective,
in this case not the California Indians!
The stories are fascinating, complex, and raise important questions
about cross-cultural communication. They must be read for these
reasons, and Gifford and Block, as well as Hurtado, must be read as
readers with culture specific understanding of the stories and the
California Indian cultures from which the stories come. The day has
passed when it was enough to see without question and concern the
other in terms of ourselves alone.
Greg Sarris
55
Bighorse the Warrior. Tiana Bighorse. Ed. Noël Bennett. Tucson: U
Arizona P, 1990. ISBN 0-8165-1189-6. 113 pp. $14.95 cloth.
"It’s important to the Navajos when you know these kind of stories.
They can keep you going. These are brave stories, and knowing them
can make you brave" (xxvii). So says Tiana Bighorse, daughter of Gus
Bighorse (c. 1846–1939) and keeper of his survival stories. In this
lovely book, Tiana Bighorse, with the assistance of her collaborator,
Noël Bennett, reconstructs her father’s life history—a series of moving
stories about an heroic and compassionate man—and the sufferings and
endurance of the Navajo people. Retelling her father’s stories in his
voice, Tiana Bighorse emphasizes how she heard the stories as a child,
how the past continues to live in the present, and how history shapes
community. Gus Bighorse’s life story begins with the serenity of family
and community living peacefully on their own land, raising peaches and
corn and children. Through his daughter’s words, he narrates how as
a young man he helped his people through the painful years of the
Long Walk, and how as an elder he is heartbroken when the government destroys his horses in the stock reduction program of the 1930s.
Although Bighorse told these stories over fifty years ago, they continue
through the storytelling voice of his daughter. This is not just Gus
Bighorse’s story, though. It is also the story of how the Navajo people
fought for their land, how his daughter came to tell a man’s story, and
how bicultural collaboration can work gracefully and well.
Gus Bighorse’s daughter was born near Mt. Taylor, one of the four
sacred mountains of the Navajo world. A member of the Deer Spring
Clan, Tiana attended boarding school from the time she was eight years
old through the 9th grade. Taught weaving by her mother from the age
of seven, she has earned her livelihood through weaving. In 1968 Noël
Bennett went to the Navajo reservation to study with Tiana Bighorse.
Her apprenticeship lasted many years, and the friendship between the
two women has deepened over twenty years. In 1971 they collaborated
on Working with Wool: How to Weave a Navajo Rug, a collection of
Tiana’s mother’s stories intended for Navajo girls and the general
public. Almost twenty years later, at Tiana’s insistence, they collaborated on a second book, this time retelling her father’s stories. The result
is Bighorse the Warrior.
Bennett provides a clear and readable historical context (99–106),
what she describes as "a chronology of significant events in Navajo and
American history and in the life of Gus Bighorse" (99), but she does
not offer much cultural context or any indication of the performance
aspect of storytelling. In the Preface, though, Bennett describes the
collaborative process, her own editorial decisions, and her relationship
with Tiana Bighorse (who is a friend and teacher, not an "informant").
"My foremost thought was to protect the integrity of the Navajo voice,"
Bennett explains; "these would be her words and thoughts, not mine"
(xv). Bennett knows how difficult a process that can be. Although she
56
does not cite scholarly theories of ethnographic translation (along the
lines of Dell Hymes or Dennis Tedlock), she is sensitive to the cultural
and linguistic pitfalls of an outsider’s attempt "to protect the integrity"
of another’s voice. She describes how Tiana spoke the stories in
English with an occasional word in Navajo. Since Navajo has no tenses
equivalent to those in English, the question of tense becomes a key
issue. In order to do justice to Tiana’s spoken language, Bennett
decides to use what some have called Red English, in this case the
English spoken by a speaker whose first language is Navajo. In
discussing these issues, Bennett suggests reweaving as a compelling
metaphor for translation. She describes how she rewove an old Navajo
blanket to look "brand new," but in the process, the blanket’s "historical integrity" was lost (xxii). Similarly, in translating, "correcting"
(i.e., changing the words to "fit some conventionalized scholarly Anglo
form" xxii), erases the speaker. Bennett’s compromise was to standardize verbs in the present tense, to edit subject–verb agreement, and to
alter "disorienting words" (xxiii). She decided against "correcting"
grammar. What remains is clarity and the eloquence of the spoken
voice.
In the Introduction, Tiana Bighorse explains how she, rather than
her brothers, came to be the recipient of her father’s stories, a man’s
stories intended for boys and men. As a little girl, she would lie in bed
and listen to her father telling stories to her brothers. "They don’t want
me to listen," she explains, "because it’s just the men that are supposed
to be listening" (xxvi). Even after her father tells her the stories are not
for her, she cannot help herself. She pretends to be sleeping, but listens
all the while. When her father discovers her, he decides that she is the
only one who is "really listening," the "one who is remembering the
stories" (xxvi). Someday, her father tells her brothers: "if she has kids,
then she’ll tell them stories she heard from me" (xxvi). Tiana retells
her father’s stories not just for her own children, though, but for the
people. "I want the people to know the warriors are brave to fight with
the enemies. I want the world to know that the Navajo warriors were
heros [sic]. . . . They pay for our land with their lives. I want
everyone to remember how the Navajo got this big reservation. They
will tell their grandchildren, and our warriors will not be forgotten"
(xxvii).
In the 1860s the Navajos were forced from their land by federal
troops led by their former friend Kit Carson. After finding his parents
murdered by U.S. soldiers, sixteen-year-old Gus Bighorse joined those
who escaped to hide in the mountains. Over the next few years he
would become acquainted with renowned Navajo resistance leaders like
Ch´il Haajiní, Dághá Yázhí, and Dághaa´ii, better known today as
Manuelito, Barboncito, and Delgadito. It was Manuelito, in fact, who
gave Bighorse orders to move his group of non-captured Navajos to the
Colorado River behind Navajo Mountain and to plant food. While the
resistors hid in the canyons and mountains, the captured people were
57
forced to go on The Long Walk (1864–1868). Around 9,000 men,
women, and children were forced to walk over 325 miles from Fort
Defiance in Arizona to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico (located
within a 30-square-mile area known as Bosque Redondo or Hwéeldi to
the Navajo). "The Long Walk is a tragic journey over frozen snow and
rough rocks" (34), remembers Bighorse. Over half of the people died.
"People are shot down on the spot" if they claim to be sick or tired or
if they linger to help another (34). "There are bodies here and there
and everywhere along the trail" (34), Tiana recalls her father saying.
Bighorse describes Hwéeldi as it was described to him by the messengers who reported regularly to the non-captured Navajo. Once they had
arrived at Hwéeldi, they explain, the people were not provided with
sufficient food or shelter. Starvation, cold, deprivation, and sorrow all
took their toll on the people. They were harassed by Comanches who
stole what little they could gather and by soldiers who forced the
Navajo to work as slave labor. They had no shelter, no firewood, no
livestock. In place of blankets they wrapped themselves in gunny sacks.
"Everybody so cold, hungry, and thin," says Bighorse. "They don’t
even look like themselves" (51). Many more died during their four
years of imprisonment. In addition to narrating stories from the Navajo
holocaust, Bighorse tells of how he was "captured by Mexicans and
taken to Mexico" (104), how he married twice and had nine children,
how he raised the largest and most beautiful horses (hence his name)
before they were destroyed by the U.S. government.
Designed, in part, as a complement to the collection of her mother’s
stories published in 1971, Bighorse the Warrior reflects the vitality of
oral traditions, the heroism of a generation of Navajos who fought for
their land, and the friendship and collaboration of Tiana Bighorse and
Noël Bennett. Bighorse the Warrior should appeal to general readers,
students, and even to many scholars. This book is a lively contribution
to the collection of published Navajo voices. The stories must be told,
insists Bighorse. Many "people died of their tragic story," explains
Bighorse, but by telling the stories "we wake ourselves up, get out of
the shock. And that is why I tell my kids what happened, so it won’t
be forgot" (82). Tiana Bighorse’s eloquent retelling of her father’s
stories highlights how the storytellers of every generation bear witness
and insure survival.
Hertha D. Wong
*
*
*
58
*
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold. Charles A. Eastman
(Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale Eastman. Intr. Michael Dorris and
Louise Erdrich. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1990. 253pp.
ISBN 0-8032-6717-7.
Wigwam Evenings ostensibly draws upon the stories Charles
Eastman recollected from his childhood in a traditional Dakota camp.
In 1874 at the age of 15 he left Manitoba, where his Santee family had
gone to escape the 1862 Minnesota war, in order to become indelibly
"civilized" under the tutelage of Dr. Alfred L. Riggs at the Santee
Agency in northeastern Nebraska. From there he went on to Beloit
College, Dartmouth, and Boston University medical school. As a young
man he served as agency physician at Pine Ridge and was a witness to
the aftermath of Wounded Knee as well as a persistent advocate for
Lakota victims of agency graft. For the rest of his life until his death
in 1939 Eastman articulately defended the spirituality and egalitarianism
of his people in eleven books, numerous articles, and lectures,
implicitly presenting himself as a model of adaptation, preserving the
Dakota heritage while taking up only the best of what the white man
had to offer:
I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from
civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian
sense of right and justice. I am for development and progress
along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce,
nationalism, or material efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I
live, I am an American. (From the Deep Woods to Civilization)
To be an American of stature in his day, one had also to be versed
in the best of thought, the Greek and Roman classics that American
educators revered. Inevitably, perhaps, his "Sioux Folk Tales Retold"
were so classicized that modern readers should be warned against
accepting them as oral narratives of the type Eastman is likely to have
heard as a child. The concluding morals emulate Aesop, and the
Victorian prose in which they are truncated and recast gives us a
familiar just-as-good-as high culture message rather than stories of
substantive cultural or literary value. As an adult Eastman apparently
regarded the oral narratives he heard as a child as tales for children and
represented them in print as simple parables. The frame of each story
includes a group of "real" children receiving prefatory explanations
from the storyteller, Smoky Day.
The best way to appreciate the assimilative quality of these "Sioux
Tales" is to compare a representative one, in this case an episode of
"Blood Clot Boy," to the Santee version transcribed by David Grey
Cloud and translated by Stephen Return Riggs circa 1881 for Dakota
Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography (1893; rpt. American Indian Culture
Research Center, Blue Cloud Abbey, Marvin, South Dakota, 1977:
95–104).
59
Since the story is about an innocent character’s loss of his home,
Eastman emphasizes the snug warmth of the children’s clothing and
their "frolicsome ride through the brightly lighted village" to Smoky
Day’s tipi where they will learn not to take their health and comfort for
granted. While Eastman had lived in a tipi (not a wigwam), Smoky
Day’s protagonist, the Badger, "lived in a little house under the hill and
it was warm and snug" with the mother Badger and the little badgers
who were "fat and merry," primarily because "gray old Badger was a
famous hunter." Smoky Day adds that "folks said he must have a magic
art in making arrows" (Wigwam Evenings 64).
From the beginning Eastman carefully ascribes belief in "magic" to
some people but leaves open the possibility for early 20th century
readers that other Dakota were not as superstitious as these "folks."
The Grey Cloud–Riggs narrator, on the other hand, makes the Badger’s
"power" the immediate focus of attention. The Badger has a hunting
practice that incorporates technique and inspiration. When his buffalo
"surround" or corral is full, he stands behind the herd and sends a
single arrow through all of them. In both stories a hungry Bear arrives,
and after Badger sends him back with food for several consecutive
days, the Bear returns with his whole family and drives the Badger
with his wife and children from their home.
Grey Cloud–Riggs emphasize the unexpectedness rather than the
injustice of the act. The Badger has extraordinary powers for hunting
and has offered hospitality tantamount to kinship, but he cannot stand
up to the Bear who bullies him into the slave-labor of hunting and
butchering and then keeps all the meat for himself. Smoky Day–Eastman supplies a rational explanation for the Badger’s inability to
resist—the Bear confiscates the Badger’s magic arrows. Grey Cloud–
Riggs allows the Badger to keep his single arrow but not the meat it
provides. The Grey Cloud–Riggs version may be an adult reflection on
historical exploitation. Victims do not lose their abilities but are denied
the fruits of their labor. Smoky Day–Eastman fills in a realistic detail
but misses the narrative’s symbolic center.
In the rest of the story Smoky Day–Eastman omits the restoration
of the Badger’s courage and health through ritualized symbolic
expression. In the Smoky Day–Eastman version repetition is eliminated
to conform to Western literary practice. The hungry Badger is reduced
to begging the Bear for food, and the Bear family laughs at his misery
except for "the smallest and ugliest" cub who later sneaks food to the
Badgers to keep them from starving. The situation is redeemed by a
deus ex machina, the "Avenger who sprang from a drop of innocent
blood." The hero is neither described nor explained. He simply arrives
and chases away the mean Bear, chivalrously sparing his wife and
children: "He ran as fast as he could, looking over his shoulder from
time to time." Smoky Day–Eastman concludes: "There is no meanness
like ingratitude" (Wigwam Evenings 69).
Grey Cloud–Riggs does not have the Badger beg the usurper.
60
Instead the Bear comes to the Badger and commands him to hunt (three
times in the story): "You Badger with the stinking ears, come out, your
surround is full of buffalo." Then after the Badger has dressed the
meat, the Bear prevents him from taking any, first by verbal threat,
then by action: "You stinking eared Badger, get away, you will trample
in my blood" (i.e. the buffalo blood that the Bear wants for himself;
this is spoken twice in the story).
The story’s repetition emphasizes not only that the Badger is being
starved for food but that he is being kept from the "blood," the power
to defend and perpetuate his children. In the Smoky Day–Eastman
version, the deliverer suddenly appears as in a saintly visitation. In
Grey Cloud–Riggs the potentiality of "blood," apparently belonging
only to the bear, is realized for the Badger through a Dakota ceremony.
After he secretly brings home a blood clot from the butchering place,
Badger’s building of an initi (sweat lodge) is carefully described. The
blood clot is purified by placing it on a bed of sage, and after the
stones are heated the ceremony revives the courage and competence of
a dispossessed people. This reversal does not occur inexplicably as in
Smoky Day–Eastman but gradually, as a development requiring trust
and patience: "Suddenly the Badger heard some one inside sighing. He
continued to pour water on the stones. And then some one breathing
within said, ‘Again you have made me glad, and now open for me.’ So
he opened the door and a very beautiful young man came out" (Riggs
102).
Blood Clot Boy tells his father to "say" sequentially that his son
shall have clothes, weapons, and food, and the words bring about the
reality. The vitalizing effect of symbolic expression is emphasized.
Then again, patience through ritual repetition is realized in the actual
killing of the Bear: "‘Now, father, do just as I tell you to do.’ To this the
Badger said ‘Yes.’ Then Blood Clot Boy continued: ‘In the morning
when Gray Bear comes out and calls you, you will not go; but the
second time he calls then go with him, for I shall then have hidden
myself’" (Riggs 103). Grey Cloud–Riggs does not spare the Bear’s
family except for the one who used to "play" with a buffalo leg before
casting it away to the Badgers. He is allowed to live but only as a
captive. Smoky Day–Eastman subtracts this "cruelty" to the enemy,
thereby missing the story’s hard lesson. Grey Cloud–Riggs is not
concerned with the Bear’s ingratitude (Eastman’s moral) but with the
Dakota means of "living" through ritual and storytelling. Instead of
being condemned or forgiven, both the Badger’s fear and the Bear’s
vice are scrupulously scourged at the end. Christianization is evident
in Eastman’s resolution of a profound problem by the intervention of
a savior rather than through the shaping disciplines of ceremony.
The rest of Wigwam Evenings contains many oral tradition motifs,
but all are embedded in a well meant, misleading attempt at cultural
public relations. Most suspect are the familiar characters and events
made to subserve "Creation" and other "origin stories." Eastman gives
61
his people a mythology in the Western sense but denies them the
distinctive voice that would complement rather than reflect his adoptive
culture.
Julian Rice
*
*
*
*
Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary
Northwest Native American Poetry. Ed. Andrea Lerner. Tucson: Sun
Tracks and The U of Arizona P, 1990. 266 pp. Cloth $37.50, ISBN
0-8165-1097-0; paper $15.98, ISBN 08165-1215-9.
Dancing on the Rim of the World comes along, handsome, welledited, and timely, to announce to the world that a Northwest Native
American literary movement has not only begun, it is well underway,
a significant new regional flourishing within the larger flourishing of
Indian writing now. Let this collection be entered alongside other fine
regional anthologies of Native poetry and prose, including the Sun
Tracks series from Arizona, and Joe Bruchac’s Iroquois and Alaskan
collections.
Interesting notion, regional. Some critics who should know better,
having fought their way clear of New Critical biases otherwise, still
sneer at it as a trivial element of literary identity, whether in Anglo
writing or in Indian myth-texts. Thus Arnold Krupat inveighs against
the "unself-conscious twaddle about . . . the poetry of place" that, to
him, disfigures the critical studies of "literary pragmatists" working on
Indian texts (For Those Who Come After xiii).
One wonders what Krupat would be able to make of the intense
imaginings of Northwest places that run through the 137 selections by
34 poets that Andrea Lerner has chosen for this anthology. In their
eloquent introductory essay (a manifesto that constitutes one of the
book’s special distinctions), poets Elizabeth Woody and Gloria Bird
assert the importance of place, of region in the fullest sense, in their
own poetry and that of their contemporaries. "The making of symbols
and images are directly entwined with our Northwest homeland, family,
their graves, teachings, and specific sites that mark our tenure" (5).
What Woody and Bird define as the Northwest, "the rim of the
world" in one of Earle Thompson’s poems ("Spirit" 214), is a huge
domain as much defined by cultural tradition and imagination as by
landform and climate, including "southern Alaska, southwestern
Canada, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Nevada, and
northern California" (1). Such is both the rich diversity and the felt
community of the poetry here collected.
In her work as editor, Andrea Lerner has cast a fittingly wide and
62
systematic net over the territory, and gathered together impressive
evidence of the new vitality of Northwest Indian writing—both in the
selections by established writers, and in those representing newcomers.
The distinguished Klallam poet and editor Duane Niatum, for example,
is represented here by several new, hitherto-unanthologized poems,
including a lovely address to his son, "Son, This Is What I Can Tell
You" (143–45)—a subject Niatum has taken up intermittently throughout his long career, but never with such clarity and grace:
. . . So my son who takes a different road
Away from the red cedar and yellow pine,
the road that brings me to my gnarled elders,
the earth and shore of my Klallam family—
try remembering when your anger is lifted
like fog from a coastal storm,
I cannot call you back, cannot offer what
wasn’t theirs, the popping fire
and butterfly dancers of this place. (145)
Likewise, Janet Campbell Hale, a well-published writer (Coeur
D’Alene) who surely deserves wider recognition, offers an extraordinary essay, "Autobiography in Fiction," amounting to a personal myth
of writing, full of allusions to her experience as an American Indian
from the Northwest, but wonderfully suggestive and wise about How
It Is with writers of all backgrounds and purposes. Readers who take
up Dancing on the Rim of the World consciously or unconsciously
expecting to find unsophisticated writing would be well advised to begin
with Hale’s very savvy essay.
And then go on, thus fortified, to survey the bounty of new,
aspiring, mixed talent that it is this book’s chief purpose and distinction
to exhibit. What’s represented here in the work of emerging poets like
Elizabeth Woody (Wasco/Navajo), Gloria Bird (Spokane), Gail
Tremblay (Onondaga/Micmac), Dian Million (Athabascan), Victor
Charlo (Interior Salish), Robert Davis (Tlingit), and Earle Thompson
(Yakima) is a vitality becoming aware of itself and its responsibilities,
connecting "tradition and the individual talent" in a way that T.S. Eliot
never dreamed of. As Woody and Bird put it in their manifesto, "By
pulling away from a trusting status with the United States and its
imposing definitions of blood quantum, we are all in a sense ‘halfbloods,’ a metaphor for walking in two worlds. In writing, we are
taking back control of our tribes and our lives" (4). And not only in
writing, one might add, noting how many of the writers in this
collection are also serious artists in other mediums: photography,
painting, sculpture, carving, and so on. Judging from this anthology
alone, the creative energy now stirring in the Indian Northwest is going
to assert itself in many styles and in many forms.
Inevitably, as Andrea Lerner acknowledges in her preface, a
pioneering anthology like this one is going to overlook some writers of
63
promise, and include others whose careers will peter out. No matter—the former will survive being overlooked here, and the latter will
at least enjoy this much notice. What matters most in Dancing on the
Rim of the World is the generous recognition this book gives now to the
arriving fact of Northwest Indian writing. Here it comes! And if one
poem can be allowed to stand, out of such a wealth of material, for
what’s coming, let it be Victor Charlo’s lovely, echoing "Flathead
River Creation," written for his English and Kootenai students in the
Two Eagle River School:
You say
old days fold into one another
and new days seem the same
Yet each moment shifts with sun,
nothing will be the same as this:
when wind breathes the Flathead alive,
you are the center this instant
for all, you are the creation
of the universe one more time. (27)
Jarold Ramsey
*
*
*
*
The Indian Lawyer. James Welch. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
349 pp. $19.95. ISBN 0-393-02896-8.
Among little known facts about Native Americans is that of the
existence of Indian lawyers. Among the better-known of these are
Thomas Sloan, an Omaha from Nebraska who served as an attorney for
the American Indian Federation in the thirties, and Charles Curtis, a
Kaw known for hastening allotment for his tribe and others as well as
being elected Vice-President under Hoover in 1928. Among the
lesser-known are myself, a Gros Ventre attorney, albeit non-practicing,
and a number of others of the present time doing the necessary work
of the law for Native American peoples across the country. And
necessary it is, for in the words of Big Bear, in the end the great cage
was made of words.
The Indian Lawyer is the first significant imagining I am aware of
related to all this, and James Welch does his usual fine job of it. The
voice of the book is genuine, and therefore right. There is honesty in
that voice, as well as James Welch’s signature final modesty, an
ever-present realization that we triumph and fail at the same time. This
is important. As N. Scott Momaday has said, "We are what we
imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.
64
Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and
that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined."
In this regard The Indian Lawyer marks a turning point in Native
American literature. James Welch has imagined an empowered,
enfranchised, successful individual who not only does not leave the
reservation only to return disillusioned, but who also picks his way
cannily through the complexities of life on the outside. Frustrated as
Native Americans and others are with the stasis and occasional
backsliding of American life, this documents some of the amazing
incidents of success of a culture that refuses to die.
Sylvester Yellow Calf, Blackfeet attorney; Harwood, powerful but
self-destructive; Patti Ann, the essential female; Lena, the lonely Crow
woman teaching among the Blackfeet; and Sylvester’s accurately
depicted traditional grandparents show the polish James Welch’s style
has attained. The characters and story line are a slick and sophisticated
vehicle for yet another hungered-for message about an enigmatic part
of all our lives.
The richness of the book comes from real stuff—James Welch
served on the Montana Prison Board of Pardons for 10 years and was
recently on the majority side of a 2–1 decision to recommend commutation of a death penalty. Though he has since retired from this
position, it is clear that the experience gave him the material to create
a realistic and vivid imagining of the prison setting. It is fascinating to
get an insider view of the closed prison subculture, and James Welch
does it well.
Casting Sylvester Yellow Calf as Indian basketball star is further
evidence of James Welch’s ability to isolate and treat with the genuine
metaphors of modern Indian life. Racked by alcoholism, poverty, and
unemployment; victimized by cheating, broken treaties and sell-outs;
robbed of some 37 million acres of land guaranteed by the U.S.
government; the Indian has taken back basketball from the whites and
made it into a way of continuing traditional ways. Though Indians
constituted only 7% of Montana’s population, their schools won 10
Class A, B, and C state high school basketball titles between 1980 and
1990. Dale Spotted, Star Not Afraid, George Yellow Eyes, Floyd
Cross Guns and Don Wetzel are legends in Montana. This may not
mean much to Corporate America, but it bespeaks a better reality, then
and now.
Sylvester Yellow Calf is a new Native American hero, and he exists
in his success as well as his isolation. His team-mates turn away from
him, but he sustains. This is a powerful evocation of what the future
can hold for a once vanishing breed.
Sidner Larson
*
*
*
65
*
In Mad Love and War. Joy Harjo. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P,
1990. 65pp. paper, ISBN 0-8195-1182-X.
Story tingles in these poems the way electricity does in a storm—
makes your hair stand up, gives an ozony smell of strange powers
moving in your world. But then, if you try to read the words by their
occasional blinding strokes to you-ward, you may get awfully frustrated. Well, YOU may not—certainly I did. I kept peering into the dark
and dazzle, trying to see just who the you might be that the I of a given
poem might be addressing: whether a friend or friends unknown to me,
or me and other readers, or all of us. The you and the I were up there
in that high dark hailstony whirling, where the power that blinks
redeyed hours into our clock radios might at any second kill our
time—and I was down in this small bulb-lit room trying to make out
what the voices of hail and thunder were saying.
Sometimes a story flashed and in its flare were deer dancers and
deer magic in an Indian bar in the Southwest ("Deer Dancer"); then it
was old daylight time in Tulsa ("Death is a Woman"), and a sleek
whiskey-breathed father dancing with his peroxided Death-In-Life in
Cain’s Ballroom. Well, I recognized Tulsa time and place and people,
though the words make them symbolic as hell: I could look up
unblinking into that flashlit cloud because way back in grade school we
used to listen to country music on the air from Cain’s Ballroom in
Tulsa.
So I like Joy Harjo’s Okie thunder, because I like to know where
any whirlwind is taking me. There’s one tornado in the book ("Autobiography") that touches down both in Tulsa and what feels like Santa
Fe, but I can ride it as calm, almost, as Elijah when that sweet chariot
swung low for him—because I know the tracks, in Indian territory, of
"doom’s electric moccasin" (thanks, Emily!), so if Joy "lived next door
to the bootlegger," I know her address, since my folks bought whiskey
there before she was born. I may find it hard to follow her through the
dark Indian country she explores with so many different stories and
powers, but when she says ("Autobiography") of Oklahoma, The
Sooner State glorified the thief. Everyone and no one was Indian, she
is exactly, horribly right. It’s the best brief word on the matter—though
a picture by Richard Ray Whitman has hammered the point home as
strongly: that one of his "Street Chiefs" series which places a REAL
Indian (one that tourists would never approve as "Indian") beneath a
great billboard on which, beside the logos of a Sioux-bonneted Indian
and a Marlboro cowboy, there is the legend BUY OKLAHOMA.
Everyone and no one was Indian. I have old friends with as much
or more Indian blood than I have, who never dance or in any way
regard themselves as anything but whites with some Indian blood. But
I have a nephew who is a quarter Osage and has blue eyes and redgold
beard and long hair—and when he danced at the Sun Dance on the
Rosebud, he was called Yellow Hair (in Lakota), a name that has its
66
echoes for Custer and Buffalo Bill freaks. His Ponca daughter was this
year’s Ponca Powwow Princess at White Eagle, Oklahoma. To be
"Indian" in Oklahoma and many places now involves no fewer shades
and varieties of being and seeming than to be "white" or "black"—
however surprising and dismaying that must be to those looking for
Real Indians in warbonnets leaving a Trail of Tears in the red
Oklahoma dust.
But in this as in other books Harjo writes many more songs of love
than of Oklahoma. Some are bluesy notes of pain and loss ("Unmailed
Letter," "The Bloodletting"), some wildflower embraces, intense and
respectful—"Rainy Dawn" for her teenage daughter, "Crystal Lake" for
her grandfather, "A Winning Hand" for Richard Hugo. Some are of
passion and love ("Desire," "City of Fire," "Crossing the Water");
others of passion and hate ("If I Think About You Again . . ."). And the
poems open up to worlds outside these United States—to the powers
and images of Egypt ("Hieroglyphic," "The Book of Myths"), to the
Reaganauts and Bushwhackers of Central America ("Resurrection,"
"The Real Revolution is Love"). Harjo keeps cool about Nicaragua:
hates what was (and is) being done to people there, but reminds us that
talking politics is different from living values.
The poems open also to the music of music. Harjo plays saxophone,
and hears with her heart—so her poem to Charlie Parker ("Bird") has
the power of shared love and pain:
To survive is sometimes a leap into madness. The fingers of
saints are still hot from miracles, but can they save themselves?
Where is the dimension a god lives who will take Bird home?
I want to see it, I said to the Catalinas, to the Rincons,
to anyone listening in the dark. I said, Let me hear you
by any means: by horn, by fever, by night, even by some poem
attempting flight home.
Another poem of crackling voltage is "Strange Fruit," words written
for Jacqueline Peters, lynched in Lafayette California in June 1986.
Maybe the hardest to bear of all the book’s poems is "Legacy," which
needs quoting entire because it shows Harjo’s capacity to face the worst
human facts and hold a sense of hope:
In Wheeling, West Virginia, inmates riot.
Two cut out the heart of a child rapist
and hold it steaming in a guard’s face
because he will live
to tell the story.
They know they have already died
of unrequited love
and in another version
won’t recognize the murdered
67
as he walks toward them
disguised as the betrayed lover.
I don’t know the ending,
or how this will make the bruised and broken
child live easier into the night
of a split world,
where in one camp the destroyers
have cooked up
a stench of past and maggots.
And in the other
love begins a dance, a giveaway to honor
the destroyed with new names.
I don’t know the ending.
But I know the legacy of maggots is wings.
And I understand how lovers can destroy everything
together.
I have not yet mentioned that the poems seem arranged in meaningful sequence. To take one example, the first poem, "Grace," matches
like a great wing the last, "Eagle Poem," which is a prayer. "Grace"
evokes a wrenching desolate winter with friends (Wind, Jim Welch)
when the three of them "like Coyote, like Rabbit, . . . could not
contain our terror and clowned our way" and yet "one morning . . .
found grace" and "once again understood the talk of animals." Finding
grace, Harjo adds—no sentimentalist!—did not improve the world: "the
next season was worse." Yet as the poem ends she insists: There is
something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have
seen it. The words empower, sweeping away all the "Dey got me! I’m
vanishing!" so dear to American ears, and they use blue-corn we not
loco-weed I.
This resistance, this refusal to let despair ice up feeling and
understanding, is Harjo’s hallmark—on the last poem, "Eagle Poem,"
as on the first, "Grace." I’d guess "Eagle Poem" an early piece that has
now found its place—it has the sound and feel of Acoma and Laguna.
It is also very much Harjo, her deep rich warm and unfooled view of
how much there is to see, how little we understand, how wonderful that
we can look out into this world:
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
68
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
Carter Revard
*
*
*
*
The Invisible Musician. Ray A. Young Bear. Duluth, MN: HOLY
COW! Press. P. 0. Box 3170, Mount Royal Station, Duluth, MN
55803. $15 cloth, ISBN 0-930100-32-8; $8.95 paper, ISBN 0-93010033-6.
Mesquakie poet Ray A. Young Bear is acknowledged by poets,
critics and students of American Indian literature as one of the nation’s
foremost contemporary native American poets.
His first book, Winter of the Salamander (Harper & Row, 1980),
brought together a powerful grouping of poetry notable for a startlingly
atavistic yet modern word way. Courses in American Indian literature
soon adopted his book. In the wake of national accolades and attention,
Young Bear was invited to teach in Southwestern and Far-Western
schools and universities.
With the publication of The Invisible Musician, Young Bear is
destined for even wider recognition—as a national treasure. Here is a
true native son who has already brought much honor to his Mesquakie
settlement, his "Red Earth" family and his fellow Iowans. As he hits
his maturity, he promises during the new decade to become even more
"visible," especially among general readers.
It is imperative to mention the ironic discrepancy that exists between
Young Bear’s esteemed national status in poetry circles and his relative
"invisibility" in Iowa and in the American popular mind. For invisibility (dare we tag it "insensitivity" or "ignorance"?) of various kinds—
69
artistic, cultural, racial, ethnic, ecological—is a major theme, a tonic
chord in the 40-odd poems that make up The Invisible Musician.
Anyone who lives in our media-enhanced world knows that poetry
is a hard sell. And yet—and this is part of Young Bear’s beautiful
concern in Musician—poetry is as close as our heartbeat, as portentous
and invigorating as an approaching storm.
And if the essences of more primal, aboriginal connections and
rhythms are drowned out by today’s automotive and industrial machinery, no wonder that the native American way and its earth-rooted
reverences, myths, dreams, ceremonies and songs are relegated to
stereotype and stylization. All the more reason to listen, to tune in, to
hear Young Bear and his anguished longing to relearn the old songs and
perpetuate them among his own Sac and Fox people, and share them
with those of us more removed from primal doings.
Young Bear’s own attempts to relocate and recenter the invisible
melodies and words, the voicings and intonations of his ancestral
Mesquakie music have not been without struggle. The marginality of
contemporary Indianness is much documented by sociologists.
Young Bear’s gift is to sing—at times in celebration, often in
lament—of assimilations accepted and thwarted. He is at once of this
country, its citizen, and before it—there, standing beside his grandfathers, letting their hopes and dreams, their superstitions and songs of
wisdom and prophecy guide him back to "memories" of his own past
and extrapolated future.
Less completely, Young Bear’s music and his role as musician
reaffirms the more general, Anglo-European American myth that is
inextricably linked to the aboriginal voice, to what William Carlos
Williams, whose own modern verse owed much to American Indian
oral traditions, called the "satyric dance."
The late Richard Hugo once observed about Young Bear that he
spoke with a voice thousands of years old. In part this is attributable to
Young Bear’s conceiving the world poetically—imagistically, rhythmically. In part it is attributable to Young Bear’s bilingualism, his ability
to think of his poetry in his ancient Algonquin tongue and speak it or
translate it into the accessibilities of English.
In Salamander and again in Musician, the effect is a transportation
that allows modern non-Indian readers to catch a glimmering of pure
Word, pure language, in a kind of atemporal, projected, eternalized
moment. There is a feeling when we listen to Young Bear listening to
his ancient and primal urgings and melodies, of transcendence, of
sacrality. It is a feeling of and for the sacredness of Word. In this
special sense, Musician is not just another book of poetry, it is an
awe-inspiring event in honor of the human mind and soul and heart.
Such profundity in Young Bear’s verse is often itself invisible.
Many of his poems are five and six pages long—and divided into
intriguingly complex parts; some poems, especially his Mesquakie love
songs, are quite short—and disarmingly simple. Here is one such song:
70
Ne to bwa ka na,
bya te na ma wi ko;
ne to bwa ka na,
bya te na ma wi ko;
ne to bwa ka na,
bya te na ma wi ko.
My pipe,
hand it over to me;
my pipe,
hand it over to me;
my pipe,
hand it over to me.
Ne a ta be swa
I shall light and inhale
a ta ma
tobacco
sha ske si a.
for the single woman.
Ne to bwa ka na,
My pipe,
bya te na ma wi ko.
hand it over to me.
In the beauty of its tribal sound and rhythms, "Mesquakie Love Song"
sings out strong and vibrant, as if from some settlement powwow or
some more ancient, now encoded and repeated love yearning and
resolve.
Such ancient up-datings are complemented throughout Musician by
contemporary dirges a propos of the angst of modern American–Indian
and non-Indian. In "Wa ta se Na ka mo ni, Viet Nam Memorial," a
poem that reflexively reiterates the volume’s title, Young Bear bridges
the ancient and the modern as only an atavistically contemporary vision
and voice can do:
Last night when the yellow moon
of November broke through the last line
of turbulent Midwestern clouds,
a lone frog, the same one
who probably announced the premature spring floods,
attempted to sing,
Veterans’ Day, and it was
sore throat weather.
In reality the invisible musician
reminded me of my own doubt.
The knowledge that my grandfathers
were singers as well as composers—
one of whom felt the simple utterance
of a vowel made for the start
of a melody—did not produce
the necessary memory or feeling
to make a Wa ta se Na Ka mo ni,
Veteran’s Song.
All I could think of
was the absence of my name
on a distant black rock.
Without this monument
I felt I would not be here.
For a moment I questioned why I had to immerse myself
71
in country, controversy, and guilt;
but I wanted to honor them.
Surely, the song they presently
listened to along with my grandfathers
was the ethereal kind which did not stop.
So too is the music, the poetry of Young Bear, the "ethereal kind"
that links us all to the old verities.
Robert F. Gish
*
*
*
*
Medicine River. Thomas King. New York: Viking, 1990. 261 pp.
$18.95 cloth, ISBN 0-670-82962-5.
Thomas King’s first novel, Medicine River, will remind many
readers strongly of two other works, James Welch’s Winter in the
Blood and David Seals’ Powwow Highway, and, taken together, they
form an effective contemporary triptych of Native humor and compassion. All three are very funny (if one’s taste runs toward the wonderful
absurdism underlying the superficial bleakness of Welch’s novel), and
all three are decidedly Indian.
To think of them together, however, is also to think of Seals’ recent
review of Welch’s new novel, The Indian Lawyer, which appeared in
The Nation (26 Nov. 1990, pp. 648–50). Praising and damning Welch
simultaneously, Seals offers an anti-aesthetic manifesto for the
contemporary Indian novel, one with some interesting and disturbing
implications; given the similarities of their novels, Seals’ comments
about Welch’s style might very well apply to King—and since King is
very close to Seals himself, the manifesto could also very well come
full circle to ensnare its own author.
Seals laments "a failure of many native writers trapped in the
mainstream morass . . . who have lost sight . . . of the sublime
spirituality bursting like the new buffalo herds all over the Western
prairies" (648). Also including Louise Erdrich, he continues to assert
that the novelists’ characters lack "the transcendent visions," the
"secrets" that have sustained many in the face of "genocide" (649).
This lament over broken cultural continuity and the compartmentalization of tradition is familiar stuff, essentially, if questionably applied to
Welch and Erdrich; however, this point is only the springboard for
Seals’ next condemnation: "The storytelling is very ‘American,’" by
which he seems to imply non-Indian, and he continues to assert that he
feels "that polished prose is not inherently where ‘Indian literature’
comes from. . . . We speak in the second person and the grammar ain’t
as good as when we’re speaking it" (649).
To Seals, Joyce and Proust are "so-called great writers" (an
72
astonishing remark), and Welch and Erdrich have broken "the barriers
into New York publishing" (649), which seems to be a very different
thing from having written Indian novels. "I can see the professors
cringing now at my (deliberately) weak grammar in this article" (649),
he boldly says (but this particular professor found little weakness here,
other than the one sentence cited above, and I admire his prose style
here as I do in Powwow Highway, a novel I teach for its style, among
other qualities). That Welch is also a professor "shows" in his novel,
and Seals postulates that Welch "seemed to be struggling to find his
tribal voice" in The Death of Jim Loney, but it was probably "choked
off" by "some goddamn editor" (649). We expect iconoclasm and
distrust of authority, particularly of the white literary establishment,
from a former member of AIM, but here Seals produces less a piece
of criticism than a grouse—or a whine.
His final assertion makes another leap in reason. Concluding that
The Indian Lawyer, although a "good book" (if "a little alien to
Indians"), is "slick and sympathetic," it is also an artifact of fad and
fashion ("Indians are ‘in’ this year") and somehow inauthentic, possibly
even hypocritical. He closes, "Why do we have to write polished prose
to make it in America?" (650), an odd question from a polished and
accomplished novelist. Is Seals calling for a postmodern Indian prose
of inarticulation, much as Tom Wolfe, in his recent manifesto, called
for a return to realism in the novel? Or has Seals spotted in Welch too
much of himself, something perhaps not altogether politically correct,
however aesthetically and literarily satisfying and praiseworthy (and if
so, how is it incorrect)?
I reject Seals’ criteria and criticisms, not simply because I find them
odd and disturbing—although I do—but because they have implications
for the state of the contemporary Indian novel, misleading ones, that are
belied by Welch, Erdrich, King, and Seals himself. While bold in
neither subject nor approach, Medicine River is a fine debut. Its
fatherless, passive, displaced protagonist, Will, is a familiar figure in
a first effort (Silko’s Tayo in Ceremony, among others, is also an heir
of Momaday’s Abel in House Made of Dawn); its narrative is familiarly
fragmented, defying location on any time continuum; its conclusion is
tentative, in the contemporary Indian manner; and its humor is
bittersweet, laced with many of the undeniable, ugly realities of Indian
life today. These are the qualities that invite comparison with other
novels, but Medicine River does not suffer by that comparison, for it
has its own spin, its own contributions and rewards.
Perhaps foremost, in addition to its gentle humor, is its pervading
sense of compassion, a knowledge of and fondness for the small
triumphs and failures of life, all of which can be endured if not
surmounted by bonding with other people: if one accepts foibles,
eccentricities, and special gifts, if one resists being judgmental, if one
allows the embrace of community. The novel, in its main plot and in
flashbacks, charts how half-breed Will (with no family name offered)
73
comes to adopt Medicine River, a small town in Alberta bordering a
Blackfeet reserve, as home, finding both place and self in the same
efforts. Equally, it is the story of another Blackfeet, Harlen Bigbear,
perhaps King’s most wonderful accomplishment. Will says, "Harlen
Bigbear was my friend, and being Harlen’s friend was hard. I can tell
you that" (11), and the true hero of the novel may well be their
friendship, for "Harlen had a strong sense of survival, not just for
himself but for other people as well" (2). His generosity and sweetness
of spirit are infectious; he is someone who can be "smiling inside, and
it was leaking out the sides of his mouth and his ears" (28). Another
flawed and endearing character, David Plume, is a gentle caricature of
an AIM activist, excessively proud of his red movement jacket, who
chides Will: "A person should do something important with their life.
You should think about that" (200). Will does think about such things,
too much, but Harlen can put it all in healthy perspective for him: "‘A
jacket,’ said Harlen ‘is a poor substitute for friends and family’" (255).
Will is also troubled by his inability to connect with his family, and,
by extension, his people: his long-since-vanished father, for whom he
makes up exotic professions; his alienated brother, with whom he broke
emotionally when they were boys; and his dead mother, whose stoic
philosophy of life, "That’s the way things are," haunts and paralyzes
Will. But with Harlen’s pushing and maneuvering, Will’s innate
kindness and sense of decency emerge incrementally, and he comes to
see that he can form an alternative family with the determined Louise
Heavyman and her purposefully illegitimate daughter South Wing;
further, the people of Medicine River and the reserve are also
"family," in the truest tribal sense, as are the fumbling but supportive
fellow members of his basketball team. After 40 years of displacement,
passively being led through white cities and relationships with Anglo
women, Will comes to a point of integration, of place, and of identity.
He is a photographer by accident, and Will’s art is static and
voyeuristic until he is led slowly to see the bigger "picture," one that
includes him, as when he offers a flat rate family portrait special during
lean times and Joyce Blue Horn takes him up on it. He learns that all
38 people who show up in his studio, and the dozens more who appear
when the session evolves into a picnic by the river, are indeed family
in a variety of senses. He has to take 24 shots, because the Blue Horn
family insist that he be in the picture with them, both literally and
metaphorically.
Oddly, while Indianness pervades the novel at every point and in
every manner, ethnicity is not the critical issue and, while pervasive,
is unobtrusive; this is a story of Community that does not require its
Native references and sensibility for its integrity but is much enriched
for being Indian. Perhaps Seals would consider this a mark of compromise or inauthenticity, but many more readers will find this quality
to be its strength; a fully Indian novel that transcends its Blackfeet (and
mixed blood) context, one that enriches the Indian perspective without
74
being dependent on it. Particularly since it is published by Viking,
King’s novel is likely to appeal to and find a wide readership.
Medicine River is a gentle and lovely novel, another prismatic view
of the same sort of world as in Winter in the Blood and Powwow
Highway. It is a fine contribution to a healthy and rapidly growing
body of contemporary Indian fiction, Seals’ pessimism notwithstanding,
and it promises much of value to come from Thomas King.
Rodney Simard
*
*
*
*
Chasers of the Sun: Creek Indian Thoughts. Louis Littlecoon Oliver.
Greenfield Review Press, 1990. 105 pp. $9.95. ISBN 0-912678-70-4.
At 86 Louis Littlecoon Oliver is the venerated elder among active
Native American poets and writers. He is a Muskogee-Creek fullblood
born in Koweta Town, Indian Territory (now Coweta, Oklahoma). Of
his previous books, The Horned Snake (Cross Cultural Communications
1982) was a bilingual chapbook of short poems, and Caught In A
Willow Net (Greenfield Review Press 1983) featured four prose pieces
and several poems. A few poems from that book are reprinted in
Chasers of the Sun: Creek Indian Thoughts, a collection deep in the
traditional wisdom of Littlecoon’s heritage. In poems, essays and
stories he imparts some of the Creeks’ indigenous southeastern ways
and beliefs, despite the fact that they were removed westward in 1832.
Their forced migration did not loosen their memory of home, however.
The predominance of West-of-the-Mississippi Indian writers can be
misconstrued to be the whole of Native American literature, and it is
true that many outstanding "southeastern" writers are Oklahoma
Cherokees. Louis Oliver’s writings can be described as reflecting his
traditional sensitivities and are distinct in acknowledging the presence
of mysteries like the Sleep Maker, the high regard for snakes used by
medicine people and when encountered on walks, and how Creeks
regard the little people. The short poem "Mind Over Matter" depicts his
grandmother’s power over a tornado by her using an ax. "Medi-care"
speaks to the power of belief in Native healing:
I’m going to see old Nokose
for him to diagnose my illness.
.......
Two big Indian dogs came out
to sniff me over.
.......
They are a part of the mysticism
of their owner.
75
And old Nokose, trancelike,
. . . spoke of entities in the spirit
world.
The slimeless snail, the legless ant
the microscopic demons
the little blue-winged hunter
wasp.
Much beyond my understanding. (45–46)
Oliver has stated on other occasions that he began writing not too long
ago, and years of careful listening make him sensitive to sound devices
that are associated: "Nokose" with "diagnose" and "slimeless" with
"legless."
For all his serious themes, a subtle humor lives in his work. The
poem "Hoot Owls Roast an Indian" records and interprets a conversation among owls about lovers at a camp. "Poetry Dead?" chides "The
forked tongue of Anglo Saxon linguists/ Articulating like rocks down
a chute." Part Three of the book, "Creek Indian Humor," contains
many brief stories that might appear mildly amusing to non-Indians, but
"Baseball Game," "An Indian Dog" and "Hotdog Question" possess the
understated humor found in daily situations. His people, Oliver relates
in his essay, "Native American Wit and Humor," "cannot discuss any
serious matters without allowing humor to intervene . . . There may be
an old stonefaced Creek leaning on his cane as people pass by. Be
assured he is smiling inwardly of something funny he saw. When he
tells it to his friends, there will be, in unison, a thunderous roar of
laughter" (54).
Chasers of the Sun has a special importance for the sagacity of its
author, Louis Littlecoon Oliver, who knows that he too, at almost 90,
is but one Creek poet who can recall and revere another among his
people, Alexander Posey from the nineteenth century. Oliver is here
with his gifted voice; his wit and keen insight should be respected by all
readers.
Ron Welburn
*
*
*
*
Simple Songs. Vickie Sears. Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books, 1990. 160
pp., $8.95 paper, ISBN 0-932379-81-8; $18.95 cloth, ISBN 0-93237982-6.
Vickie Sears’ particular talent is the evocation of the plight of foster
children, the double victims of abandonment and abuse. Their
experiences are gruesome. In "Grace," a story which features the only
loving set of foster parents in the collection, the child Jodi Ann
76
remembers making friends with a wild kitten in the fields outside the
orphanage. When the matron discovers the affection between the child
and the animal, she kills the kitten and hangs it around the child’s neck,
claiming that Jodi Ann killed it and that this is her punishment. In the
story "Connie," a sadistic matron handles the orphan in this way:
Already the offense Connie had committed was forgotten in
her quaking mind as she waited to see how else Mrs.
Cornell would punish her beside beating her hands red with
the metal edge of the ruler.
"Now," Mrs. Cornell said, proffering a long green
bottle with one hand and a shot glass with the other, "this
will make both your hands and your insides feel good, you
sweet child."
So the amber fluid went hot down Connie’s throat and
a burning poured over her skin. It began. Days of punishment and days of drinking . . . (47).
Sears’ collection of fourteen stories centers on familiar themes: the
struggle for a stable identity that honors the mixture of Indian and other
blood; the child-narrator reliving a painful past; the struggle around
alcoholism; the celebration of lesbian culture and consciousness; the
positive role and influence of the grandmother figure; the presence of
tribal magic in the midst of city; the contrast between superficial New
Age awareness and the enduring stability of ancient belief systems.
Although other issues inform some stories, the idea of the tormented
child infiltrates every one.
In "Keeping Sacred Secrets," Mary Ann learns to stay out of her
white mother’s way. When her Indian father dies, part of her world
collapses, and "Everything she thought she had carefully tucked inside
herself tilted in her belly pot and burned" (10). The emotional
separation she feels from her mother and stepfather is represented
physically; she lives in their converted garage. Sears presents the clash
between Indian and Anglo culture by aligning the Indian with the
vulnerable child and the white with the blind, arrogant adult. When her
mother tells her to throw away sacred Indian objects, Mary Ann,
drawing on the healthy experiences in her Indian grandmother’s home,
devises a ceremony to bury them. Her anguish is immense, but she
feels some solace by remembering her grandmother’s words: "All you
do with a good heart is enough" (16).
"Keeping Sacred Secrets" is troubled by some technical problems
that plague the whole collection. It is difficult to recreate the world of
the child without infecting it with adult perceptions, and there are
lapses. For example, Mary Ann explains herself to her mother in this
speech:
"I made up my mind. I’ll use his name and I won’t tell
anybody you’re divorced. People can think I’m his kid so
you’ll be happy. But I won’t say I’m Italian. I won’t say
77
I’m Indian either, unless they ask. Then, if they do, I’m
gonna say they have to get answers from you. I think that’s
a whole bunch, so don’t ask for nothing else. I can’t be
what you want. I’m already me." (17–18)
It rings false; I hear the jaws of the character-puppet clicking as she
speaks the author’s lines. This is not the kind of speech that most of us,
in our fear and vulnerability, gave when we were children.
Similarly, in "A Fact of Light," two politically astute and artistic
lesbian lovers converse with each other like this: "Is being a marginal
woman like patriarchal oppression?" (36). They are not being ironic.
This is a Theme Story, and ordinary ideas seem burdened with political
weight. Meta notices that her Anglo friend Rory is wearing crystal
earrings:
"Aren’t they great? They’re such an energy draw. I
mean, I can just feel them pulling positives toward me ..."
"Those are healing stones in my tribe. They require a
lot of respect and cleaning."
"I respect them, Meta. I feel their power. Do you think
I don’t?" (33)
Things don’t go much more smoothly between Meta and her lover
Shelly; their conversation is as stagey. Miraculously, the basic warmth
of the relationship between them still comes through, despite the stilted
dialogue that passes for conversation between them.
Another example of Sears’ strong but uneven skills is her handling
of the internal emotional state of the main character in "Connie." An
alcoholic woman asleep in the Farmer’s Market in Seattle wakens,
dizzy with nausea, and begins an alarming interior monologue which
begins "You silly old thing" and does not improve. The reader wants
to be inside the character as she unravels her feelings, but instead the
experience is like reading a billboard. Then Sears ends her character’s
speech this way:
Connie began laughing. She fell back into the grass, rolling
onto her stomach. She laughed until she dreamt. (47)
The seamless laugh-into-dream sequence is unique, a surprise, and it
suggests a promising lyrical imagination still working its way up
through some narrative uncertainties.
This narrative uncertainty comes through again in "Flower Spirits."
Elizabeth Jane steals flowers from a cemetery and sells them around
town, earning enough for a softball uniform. It is satisfying to watch
the child outsmart her bossy mother and her racist coach. More
interesting, however, is the crematorium in the middle of the flowerfilled cemetery. The caretaker is speaking:
"There’s the noise from the fire itself, but it’s the people
who make most of the noise. They bend and fold, and there
are gasses trapped in the body, organs that pop, bones and
78
all. They make a lot of sounds, but they don’t hurt. They’re
already dead, so it isn’t anything for you to worry about."
(59)
An image this striking demands attention, but, unaccountably, it is
abandoned, its potential unrealized.
Several stories move away from the core experiences of violence
and neglect. Except for some self-conscious poetic diction "Music
Lady" moves successfully down a very fine line separating tenderness
from sentimentality. The forty-five year old narrator remembers a part
of her childhood when she hung shyly around a record store in the days
when you could ask to try out a tune in a soundproof booth. The Anglo
owner, sensitive to the Indian child’s undeclared needs, arranges for
her to have a booth to listen in, and encourages her to keep writing
poetry. Many years later, the narrator returns and the owner, now a
very old woman, remembers her. It’s a sweet moment; the two women
have honored each other with memory and affection. The long thread
of the shopowner’s generosity sutures one of her many psychic wounds.
Some of the stories are intended to be amusing. "Flower Spirits"
and "Pasta Saturday" (the nude noodle-making grandmother is unforgettable) have a gentle, rueful humor. "Bra One," the most complex
story of this group, dramatizes an important first purchase, but,
expectedly, the comedy loops back to the abused-child theme. The
humorous dimension shows the process of being prodded, rearranged,
and stuffed into serious white undergarments:
I slipped my arms into the holster, bent down to sag my
breasts into the cups, and began to snap up. The bra
covered half my stomach. It seemed as though there were
thirty hooks. Finally harnessed, I looked at the monstrosity
in the mirror. (84)
The child, embarrassed, suddenly cannot fit into children’s clothes, and
the mother, brutal in her lack of empathy for her daughter’s adolescent
self-consciousness, announces that it will now be necessary to shop in
a maternity store for a top that will fit. Identity and self-esteem issues
around body images were poorly understood by ordinary people during
the time when this story is set, but the reader is left with the sense that
the mother would have found something even more punishing to say if
this easy target had not been available.
The strongest story, "Letting Go," dramatizes a psychotic break. It
is not perfect; shifts between the point of view of the woman experiencing the break and the narrator describing the woman experiencing the break prevent perfect empathy between character and reader.
Sears’ subject is important and not easily captured; the terror and
monotony of madness has eluded accurate description for centuries. But
she has a talent for it. In an earlier story, "A Fact of Light," she shows
that she can capture the disorientation of waking from a dream: "There
were half-shadows from the tree outside the window. Normally
79
peaceful, their sliding over the walls now seemed a fearful crawling"
(27). "Letting Go" takes it further: "There is a scream resting on my
tongue and my thumb is its guardian" (95). In this story, the strands of
Sears’ life come together, and the power that is created is impressive.
Writer, therapist and teacher, she uses her experiences and her
Cherokee-Spanish-English background to create a character whose
break with reality is vivid. Autistic repetition and rhyme, alien as they
are in discourse, are logical here. Extreme dissociation results in
mangled self-awareness, as in this description of her tongue:
It is too thick for my mouth. It swells with air. Pushes out
between the teeth. Swells up to press on my nostrils. It has
a scream locked inside it. It would come out if someone had
the sense to pop the tongue-balloon. (108)
Despite a relatively weak ending (an abrupt transition into the present
tense and the mind of the now-functional adult narrator), the story
succeeds on the strength of its subject: the sexual abuse of a child, the
resulting chronic denial of feelings, the ensuing confusion of cultural
identity, and the added pressures of full-time work and single parenthood. The madness of the abused child that expresses itself in the
psychosis of the adult woman is a subject that perhaps cannot be
exhausted.
This is a collection in which the stories draw power from each other
by virtue of their placement in the group. Singly, their difficulties
threaten their strengths. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the collection
that I could ignore Sears’ habit of dropping the subjects of some but not
all sentences in a paragraph, an affectation that produces a bumpy
syntactical ride and makes this reviewer think about grammar, not
characters. Some of the stories serve more therapeutic and political than
artistic ends. Still, the voice coming out of them is honest, courageous,
and powerful, and the representation of childhood trauma inflicted
deliberately or accidentally is an important addition to our understanding of the process of individuation in any culture.
Rhoda Carroll
*
*
*
*
A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography of Chief
G. W. Grayson. Ed. W. David Baird. Norman and London: U of
Oklahoma P, 1988. 164 pp. ISBN 0-8061-2103.
Although appearing at first glance to be just one more Civil War
memoir, this book is actually a highly interesting Indian autobiography.
Or perhaps I should say Métis autobiography, for as the editor says in
the Preface, Grayson was a member of that "elite subgroup among the
80
Creeks." Grandson of a Scottish trader who went into the Creek
territory of modern-day Alabama in the 1790s, Grayson had dark red
hair and a complexion that was "quite white." He went to Arkansas
College in Fayetteville, was a nineteen-year-old Captain in a Creek
Confederate regiment, and later was tribal treasurer and secretary. As
a partner in Grayson Brothers, Eufaula, Oklahoma, he had interests in
retailing, cattle, cotton-ginning, and rental properties and was a rich
man. With fellow Creek leaders, he made trips to Washington to
oppose dissolution of the Creek Nation. But when it happened, he
remained influential, finally being tribal chief from 1917 until his death
in 1920.
But the life-story alone is not what makes his autobiography so
remarkable. More important is the sense of self that Grayson exhibits,
both as a dignified tribal leader and patriarch and as the maker of his
own rules in the writing of an autobiography. "I have no recollection
of ever having read an autobiography written by anyone else," he
announces on his first page, "and hence have adopted no model by
which to be guided in my effort, and supposing that it would probably
be conceded that each such writer may justly be a law unto himself, I
have proceeded to write in my own way, and as suits me best." He is
writing, he goes on, just for his family ("of whom I expect the widest
charity in their estimates of my numerous shortcomings"), and he is
going to write about what he chooses and say what he likes.
Of course, Grayson is not the first autobiographer to announce such
assumptions, and the further we read him, the more we realize that he
was not so original as he claims. His style is often florid and Victorian
and sometimes tedious, with phrases like "the dim and hazy past," "his
trusty musket," or "our artillery . . . belching forth its death-dispensing
contents." He also seems unconsciously victimized by inconsistencies
in his allegiances to both his Creek and his Scottish ancestry. He
praises his grandfather for "belonging to that class of useful pioneers
ever found in the van of progress, boldly and openly blazing the way
for advancing civilization and empire"—even though in the end it was
"civilization and empire" that destroyed the Creek Nation.
But proud, independent and "a law unto himself" Grayson still
believed himself to be, and the result is an autobiography that in a sort
of stodgy, bewhiskered way is wonderfully idiosyncratic and both
playful and profound.
The first freedom which he thinks autobiography grants him is the
freedom to talk at length about his genealogy, and so chapter one, as
the editor has organized the unbroken manuscript, is nearly twenty
pages of it. We hear about Robert Grierson, whose name was changed
to Grayson, Grayson speculates, because "unlettered persons and
Grierson’s own negro slaves" pronounced Grayson for Grierson. ("If
there was anything in a name," he reflects, "I would move for a return
to the original.") We hear about his Creek wife Sin-o-gee, and we hear
about their wealth and their children. Footnotes also refer briefly to
81
collateral ancestors who have been cut from the manuscript, either "at
the request of Grayson’s heirs" or to shorten it, the editor says. What
we don’t hear much about is Grayson’s mother’s genealogy, because
"it is my misfortune to know scarcely anything about it." But whether
from age (he wrote the autobiography in 1908, when he was 65), his
Indian heritage, his Southern heritage, family pride, or the combination
of all of them, ancestry meant a great deal to him. He was proud of
being Métis.
The second great influence in his life, as he saw it when he wrote,
was his education, starting with "old Asbury," a "Manual Labor
School" near Eufaula, run by missionaries. Though often made to wear
"the dunce cap," he studied hard, preparing for "the battle of life which
I have subsequently engaged in." Later, at Arkansas College he "spoke
not a word of Indian" and liked mingling with "well dressed people."
But it was Grayson’s Civil War experiences which were most vital
to his sense of self. As a young officer, he learned to shoulder
responsibility. For his later life, it gave him experiences, encapsulated
in a large stock of stories, to share with his fellow veterans, his family
and business partners. As we read these reminiscences, we sense that
by 1908 Grayson had told them hundreds of times, so that even if a
"law unto himself" in written autobiography, in oral discourse he knew
all the rules—and all the tricks. Speaking of his colonel’s address, in
Indian, to the troops before a battle, he even says that it was "the finest
war-speech I ever heard." Grayson was a connoisseur of talk!
One of his own best tales is of trying to find his way back to his
regiment and encountering another lost soldier who wanted to ride with
him. "I had no excuses to urge against his becoming my traveling
companion," Grayson says, "except that he was a blond—blond hair,
eye lashes, moustache and gray eyes, in fact blond all over. I cannot
explain why, but I am not partial toward, but on the contrary have to
confess to having always as now rather a repugnance to blonds of all
degrees." But feeling that this prejudice should not matter, Grayson
rode with the man. Soon they encountered two sleeping Union soldiers,
and the man wanted to shoot them with his pistol. But Grayson noted
that the pistol was corroded and might not fire, and so advised against
it. During the next few days Grayson’s common sense and good
woodsmanship saved their lives several more times. Yet when they
finally reached headquarters, "my blond friend, now somewhat bronzed
by his exposure," took all the credit for their survival. So Grayson
reflects what this might mean and what he should have done, explaining
that only here, in an autobiography intended just for his family, does
he confess his annoyance. Finally, forgiving the man, whom he has
never seen since, Grayson says, "If dead, peace to his ashes; if alive
still, abundant success to comrade Washington."
This concluding identification of the man as "Washington," named
after the great white father himself (as too was George Washington
Grayson!), seems like a telling bit of Indian irony. Grayson the
82
redheaded Creek had saved "Washington." Most of his other stories
have similar twists, emphasizing his strong sense of independence,
dignity, and humor. If there were conflicts in his inheritance, there were
also subtle dual perspectives, lurking resolutions.
But the greatest of his ironies is in his protest over the dissolution
of the Creek Nation. "Here we, a people who had been a self-governing people for hundreds and possibly a thousand years, who had a
government and administered its affairs before such an entity as the
United States was ever dreamed, are asked and admonished that we
must give up all idea of local government, change our system of land
holding to that which we confidently believed had pauperized thousands
of white people— . . ." Thus does Grayson begin his lament, in a
sentence too long to quote in full. This book is a real find, a unique
addition to the small number of bona fide, early, Indian-white, Métis
autobiographies.
Robert F. Sayre
*
*
*
*
Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present.
Ed. Penny Petrone. Toronto: Oxford U P, 1991. 184 pp. $19.95 paper,
ISBN 0-19-540796-2.
The book cover proclaims this the "first critical study of the
literature of Canada’s native peoples" and the author herself describes
it as a "pioneering" (8) work. These are rather exaggerated claims
given the amount of scholarship that is taking place in the field of
Native Canadian literature. To name only some of the recent releases
will demonstrate the interest in this area: Heather Hodgson (Ed.) Seven
Generations (Theytus Books), Agnes Grant (Ed.) Native Literature in
the Curriculum (University of Manitoba) and Our Bit of Truth: An
Anthology of Canadian Native Literature (Pemmican Publications),
Jeanne Perreault and Sylvia Nance (Eds.) Native Women of Western
Canada: Writing the Circle—An Anthology and Beth Brant (Ed.) A
Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women.
Native Literature in Canada does, however, have a major difference. Petrone has painstakingly researched Native writers from the
earliest to contemporary times and has put their work in historical
context along with data and anecdotes about the authors’ lives. The
book is arranged in chronological order beginning with an undated
period of oral literatures, 1820–1850, 1850–1914, 1914–1969, 1970–
1979 and 1980–1989. If a disproportionate amount of time is spent on
1820–1914 it can be excused because this is the author’s area of
expertise. Her excellent 1983 publication First People, First Voices
(University of Toronto) made a very important contribution to an
83
understanding of that time period.
This book leaves the reader with feelings of considerable unease,
because it perpetuates the generally negative attitudes towards Natives
that have long prevailed. The author’s encouraging comment: "I have
endeavoured to reveal a richness and complexity that are worthy of
serious and enligthening examination" (8) is overshadowed by the
negative imagery and examples she uses and by her emphasis on Native
literature arising from political and social realities while aesthetic and
creative aspects are all but ignored.
The book is clearly written by a non-Native scholar for other
non-Native scholars. Of Basil Johnston’s work she says,
. . . (the stories) are told as fiction but are based in fact and
give life to a world of comedy most of his readers would
never have seen or heard. (126).
With this statement she dismisses the wide Native readership Johnston
enjoys and the numerous Native literature courses that utilize his work.
The Introduction (1–8) relies largely on historic sources, though
Paula Gunn Allen, George Cornell and Basil Johnston are mentioned.
One wonders at the need for the author’s aside when she says,
There were even some Canadians who believed that the
Indians were a degraded and hopeless race, incapable of any
mental progress, and possessed of so little that was human
that even compassion was wasted on them. (2)
When one reads that George Copway was imprisoned for embezzlement
of missionary funds one wonders at the connection between this
information and Canadian Native literature.
Petrone concedes that there are problems with translations of oral
literatures, but her chapter on "Oral Literatures" relies largely on the old
sources—Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Edward S. Curtis, Frances
Densmore, Diamond Jenness, David Bayle, Natalie Curtis, Franz Boaz,
Horatio Hale and the Jesuit Relations. There is a brief reference to
Paula Gunn Allen and Alexander Wolf, but otherwise, recent scholarship in this area is largely ignored. She does, however, include
commentary by George Copway which adds valuable information from
a Native perspective.
The chapters on contemporary writing include an exhaustive list of
"who is who" in Native literature today. There are good summaries of
the works that exist which can serve as guides for prospective buyers.
Petrone’s attempts at critical commentary on literary qualities are less
successful. Her comments on Basil Johnston’s short stories include:
Many of the protagonists of these stories are stereotypes
—the welfare bum, the comic drunk, the shiftless and
irresponsible—but Johnston exposes the absurdities of his
characters with such good-humoured teasing caricature that
the reader forgets about their stereotypical behaviour and
84
enjoys them as human beings. (24).
Petrone misses the point that Johnston, like many other Native writers,
uses stereotype as trope or that it is used to "make faces" at non-Native
society, as pointed out by Kate Vangen, in Thomas King, Cheryl
Calver and Helen Hoy, The Native in Literature (Hignell Printing,
1987).
Her commentary on contemporary writers consists largely of
summary statements, which perhaps is fortunate, since few writers
escape her sharp criticism. Jorden Wheeler is a "singular new voice in
short fiction" (145) but his novellas are "often awkward and disjointed"
(148). Basil Johnston resorts to "overblown rhetoric" (150), Lee
Maracle is accused of "heavy preaching" (151), Jeanette Armstrong
"gets mired in factual data, lengthy explanations, and bewildering
digression" (142), and so it goes. Some writers, however, do meet with
the author’s unqualified approval. Thomas King "demonstrates his skill
as a writer" (144), Jean Crate displays "an astonishing mastery of
technique and of supple and evocative prose" (143) and Beatrice
Culeton’s work "is elevated from the melodramatic cliché by its daring
honesty and energy" (140). Petrone’s commentary on Native poetry and
drama shows greater insight into Natives as literary artists and makes
for more enjoyable reading.
The conclusion of this book is disquieting. It is full of generalizations and contradictions. Earlier, for example, the author acknowledged
the role of the trickster in Thomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters, but in
the conclusion she dismisses the trickster as an "archetypal" figure and
Highway’s work a movement into the surreal. Highway himself says
[the trickster is] as pivotal and important a figure in the
Native world as Christ is in the realm of Christian mythology
and again,
We believe [the trickster] is still among us—albeit a little
worse for wear and tear—having assumed other guises.
Without him—and without the spiritual health of this
figure—the core of Indian culture would be gone forever.
(The Rez Sisters, Fifth House, 1988).
Though it may be difficult for non-Native readers to understand the role
the trickster plays in Highway’s plays, it is definitely not an archetypal
figure in the Western literary sense.
The conclusion leans heavily on the assumption that Native literature
has arisen from a political and social need. This is certainly true, but
to ignore the aesthetic and creative needs of a people does them an
injustice. The conclusion abounds with negative phrases—"debasing
experiences," "excesses of emotion," "victim syndrome." The author
says,
A resurgence of Indian cultural and religious values has
85
made these writers realize that they are heirs to a wealth of
traditional oral literature upon which they can draw inspiration and direction. (182)
Yet earlier in her book she carefully documents those Native writers
who wrote but could not get published until recently. To suggest that
Native people have not had their own knowledge and values is
offensive, especially from an author who has carefully documented how
expression of this knowledge was not permissible.
Is there a place for a book such as this in the canon of Native
literature? It serves as a source of historic information and impeccably
researched data. It includes a comprehensive, twelve page bibliography
of largely Canadian Native authors or commentary on Native writing
which is a very useful source of information. As a "critical study" of
literature of Canadian Natives, however, it falls short of its objectives.
Agnes Grant
*
*
*
*
Paula Gunn Allen. Elizabeth I. Hanson. Western Writers Series,
Number 96. Boise: Boise State University, 1990. ISBN 0-88430-095-1.
It is surprising that the work of Paula Gunn Allen, often quoted and
always referred to in recent studies on American Indian literature,
hasn’t received more critical attention. There are articles on aspects of
her work and interviews with her available, but, to my knowledge,
there is no book-length study of Allen yet. Elizabeth Hanson’s short
study of Paula Gunn Allen is the first attempt then to pull the disjointed
material together and to offer important personal data and background
material that the reader of her work would find difficult to obtain.
Hanson’s division of her material into sections—"Short Biography,"
"Literary Criticism," "The Early Poetry," "Feminist Poetry," Shadow
Country," "The Woman Who Owned the Shadows," and "Concluion"
—provides easy assess to specific information. Particularly useful are
the sections on poetry, since readers are most likely familiar with
individual poems from anthologies of American Indian poetry and
literature. These encounters with single poems do not facilitate the
reader’s recognition of metaphors and themes that run through Allen’s
poetry. Hanson’s discussion of the body of Allen’s poetry in the
sections "The Early Poetry," "Feminist Poetry" and "Shadow Country"
makes that information accessible and provides a reading, by necessity
partial and fragmented, of key poems. While Allen’s poetry is available
it is difficult to obtain a copy of her one novel, The Woman Who
Owned the Shadows (1983); here Hanson provides a short summary of
the novel, a short reading of the same and attempts to place it within
the context of her other work. It is unfortunate that Hanson does not
86
refer the reader to Allen’s own reading of her novel in The Sacred
Hoop (1986) which would add an additional, and very interesting,
dimension to Hanson’s reading of the novel.
In Paula Gunn Allen Hanson experiences the same problems as
other writers of the Western Writers series whose subjects were prolific
and important contributors to literature; it is impossible to do justice to
the amazing scope of Allen’s work as a critic, poet, novelist, and
academic in the prescribed number of pages. Hanson attempts to solve
that problem by imposing a frame on Allen’s work, the "breed
persona." In the first paragraph of her study Hanson states: "To stand
outside, to be and yet not to be, becomes, at least in Allen’s case, a
source of subtle self-exploration as well as extraordinary art" (5). This
theme, the mediator between cultures, runs through the entire study,
and everything is subjected to it. While the problem of the breed is a
theme that occurs in much of contemporary American Indian literature,
it cannot replace other themes that are just as important, e.g., the sense
of place. The reader finishes the study with the sense that Allen is
excluded from the American Indian part of her heritage because of her
status as a "breed," has no part in the "racial memory" as N. Scott
Momaday called it in his essay "The Man Made of Words." In The
Sacred Hoop, however, Allen regards herself clearly as part of the
American Indian community that used to be a gynocracy before the
advent of the whites. In an interview with Joseph Bruchac in Survival
This Way (1987) she also speaks of other themes, themes that are as
important to her as the one Hanson chooses to emphasize: ". . . it
[House Made of Dawn] brought my land back to me. . . . Part of what
I was going through was land sickness—loss of land" (11; her emphasis). Forcing Allen’s work into the framework "breed" denies its
richness and accords one theme an importance that Allen herself does
not give it. As the Introduction to The Sacred Hoop shows, she
considers herself a participant in a number of communities, not merely
a mediator between the white and American Indian communities.
The space restrictions also lead to sweeping generalizations that do
a disservice to the literary criticism of American Indian literature. In
"Literary Criticism," for example, Hanson deals primarily with Allen’s
two book-length studies of American Indian literature, Studies in
American Indian Literature (1983) and The Sacred Hoop. There can be
no doubt that Studies is as important a contribution to the field and as
valuable to those who teach American Indian literature as Hanson
claims. Hanson’s discussion of Studies implies, however, that the
collection of critical essays and course designs edited by Allen provides
the reader with an exclusive American Indian viewpoint on the study
of American Indian literature and seems to deny the validity of white
criticism. A great number, perhaps the majority, of contributions come
from white scholars in the field, e.g., Larry Evers and A. LaVonne
Ruoff. The work of these white critics has shown that sensitivity to
cultural differences and the knowledge of history, anthropology, etc.,
87
that, according to Hanson, Allen demands of critics. Only those
familiar with Studies know that the contributors are mostly white
critics. The reader of Paula Gunn Allen feels encouraged to dismiss all
white criticism, instead of developing a sensitivity of his own that
permits him to judge literary works and their criticism by their merits.
Elizabeth Hanson manages in her study to give the reader a sense
of Paula Gunn Allen’s wide range of achievements as critic, poet and
novelist. Hopefully, her study will serve as an incentive for others to
write the full-length study of her work or the bio-critical study her
work deserves. Meanwhile, Hanson’s Paula Gunn Allen provides the
reader with some very necessary general information and a first
glimpse of the person Paula Gunn Allen.
Birgit Hans
*
*
*
*
Briefly Noted
The winter–spring 1991 number of Tamaqua is a special Native
American issue edited by Joe Bruchac and featuring new fiction by
Ralph Salisbury and Lisa McCloud, poetry by Barney Bush, Charlotte
DeClue, lance henson, Will Sanders, Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya, Jim
Barnes, Maurice Kenny, H. E. Erdrich, Bob Gish, Jean Starr, Gloria
Bird and Roberta Whiteman, and non-fiction by Joe Bruchac and Bob
Gish. A generous selection of art and an article on American Indian art
also enliven the issue. For information on how to order, write to
Tamaqua, Parkland College, 2400 W. Bradley Avenue, Champaign, IL
61821-1899.
Paul Zolbrod has written a thoughtful introduction to the University
of New Mexico reprint of Franc Johnson Newcomb’s collection,
Navaho Folk Tales, originally published in 1967. As Zolbrod points
out, even supposedly bowdlerized versions of stories can be important
in the total scope of an oral literature. Another important reprint comes
from University of Oklahoma Press: Michael Castro’s Interpreting the
Indian now in paper with a foreword by Maurice Kenny; Castro’s book
is the most thorough treatment to date of the interaction between
modernist and Native American poetics.
Campesino: The Diary of a Guatemalan Indian prints the diary of
the pseudonymous Ignacio Bizarro Uzpan from 1977–1984, as
translated and edited by James D. Sexton (University of Arizona
Press). This fascinating document is rich in cultural, political, psychological and historical insights; it offers an opportunity for challenging
comparisons with diaries like those of Samuel Pepys or Samuel Sewall,
or with other autobiographical texts elicited in written form (e.g., Sun
Chief, Crashing Thunder). Unfortunately, the political and human-rights
situation in Guatemala, all too amply described in the course of the
88
author’s everyday life, has changed little since publication of the book
in 1985.
Cree storytelling is the subject of a monograph in the series Voices
of Rupert’s Land, edited by H. C. Wolfart. Titled "Now then, still
another story—": Literature of the Western James Bay Cree, Content
and Structure, the pamphlet prints the 1988 Belcourt lecture delivered
by C. Douglass Ellis. In his discussion Ellis explains categories of Cree
oral song, oratory and storytelling art forms, and discusses important
story cycles and motifs.
Memoirs 2 and 5 in the Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics series
offer Cree and Ojibway stories for those seeking to maintain or
improve language competence. Memoir 2, titled kiskinahamawâkanâcimowinisa, is Cree stories written by Cree students and printed in
Cree syllabics, Roman alphabet transliteration, and English; the editor
and translator, Freda Ahenakew, has also included a Cree–English
glossary. Number 5 is pisiskiwak kâ-pîkiskwêcok / Talking Animals;
these are tales told by L. Beardy and edited and translated by H. C.
Wolfart. These works are also printed in tripartite syllabic/Roman/
English parallel texts. A third offering from the same publisher is The
Moons of Winter and Other Stories by Norman Quill, printed in
syllabics. For more information write to Algonquian and Iroquoian
Linguistics, Fletcher Argue Building, 28 Trueman Walk, WINNIPEG,
Manitoba, R3T 2N2 Canada.
Another monolingual text comes from the Native Languages
Programme in the Department of Native Studies at the University of
Manitoba. The Stories of Alice King of Parry Island were transcribed
by Jean Rogers and edited by John D. Nichols; they are printed in
Roman type and intended for teachers and students of the Ojibwe
language.
The Centre for Research and Teaching of Canadian Native Languages at the University of Western Ontario has begun a series of
monographs reprinting important texts. Number 1 in the series is a
bigingual edition of "Statement Made by the Indians," a petition drawn
up by the Chippewas of Lake Superior in 1864. Number 2 is An
Ojibway Text Anthology edited by John D. Nichols. The series
addresses the needs of linguists as well as language learners and
teachers; volumes are hard bound, texts are printed in parallel Ojibwe
(Roman alphabet) and English, followed by interlinear translations;
apparatus includes glossaries, introductions, some critical commentary,
and bibliographies.
Amerindia is the journal of the French Association for American
Indian Ethnolinguistics; North American contact is Guy P. Buchholtzer,
Department of Linguistics, Simon Frazer University, Burnaby, B.C.
V5A 1S6 Canada. Chantiers amerinidia, a special supplement in the
1990 volume, prints "BAXwBAKwALANUSIWA / Un Recit Haisla / A
Haisla Story" as told by Gordon Robertson; this is a story about the
central figure in traditional northwest coast winter ceremonials. The
89
multilingual edition prints the story first in Haisla orthography; this text
is followed by French and then English translations; additional sections
of the monograph offer a commentary and a linguistic analysis with
interlinear translations. Notes and a bibliography complete the
apparatus.
Another important scholarly resource comes to us from Mexico:
Tlalocan: Revista de Fuentes para el Conocimiento de las Culturas
Indigenas de Mexico publishes articles in Spanish and English and texts
in the indigenous languages of Mexico. Volume XI (1989) contains a
modern poem written in Nahuatl together with Spanish translation; the
original and translation (into English) of a Spanish document written in
1835 by a Pima tribal leader; and several articles including texts and
translations from Native languages into Spanish. Editors: Miguel LeonPortilla and Karen Dakin, Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas,
Ciudad de Humanidades, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510 Mexico, D. F.
Helen Jaskoski
*
*
*
90
*
CONTRIBUTORS
Rhoda Carroll is Director of the Integrating Studies program at Vermont
College of Norwich University in Montpelier, Vermont. She has published
poetry, fiction and reviews in a wide variety of periodicals.
William M. Clements teaches at Arkansas State University. His publications in Native American studies include Native American Folklore, 18791979: An Annotated Bibliography (with Frances M. Malpezzi), Native
American Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, and a recent essay
on Schoolcraft’s translations.
Carole Gerster and Marshall Toman, assistant professors of English at
the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, presented their paper to the
National Association for Ethnic Studies. They have given presentations on
"Teaching Multicultural Literacy through Film" for the Minnesota Council
of Teachers of English and on "Curriculum Development: Ethnic Film and
Literature" for the University of Wisconsin System’s Institute on Race and
Ethnicity. Gerster’s paper "From Film Margin to Novel Center: Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye" will appear in West Virginia University
Philological Papers, Fall 1992. Toman is director of ethnic studies at River
Falls with special interests in film and short story.
Robert F. Gish teaches in the Department of English at the University of
Northern Iowa, where he instituted a general education course in Native
American and Chicano literature. He is a contributing editor to The
Bloomsbury Review. His latest book is William Carlos Williams: The Short
Fiction (G. K. Hall, 1989).
Dr. Agnes Grant teaches Introductory Native Studies, Native Literature,
Native Education and Women’s Studies courses at Brandon University,
Manitoba, Canada. Most of her teaching takes place in isolated and remote
communities where Brandon University Northern Teacher Education
Program (BUNTEP) trains Native teachers.
Birgit Hans has a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona with emphasis on
American Indian literatures. She is preparing an edition of the short fiction
of D’Arcy McNickle for publication. She will edit a special issue of SAIL
devoted to European criticism of Native American literature.
Toby Langen writes about Puget Salish language and literature and teaches
in the extension program at Northwest Indian College.
Sidner J. Larson (Gros Ventre) is a mixedblood raised on the Fort
Belknap reservation of northcentral Montana. He has published poetry and
critical articles in numerous literary magazines. He is currently at work on
his Ph.D. dissertation, concentrating on issues of identity as they apply to
Native Americans in American literature, at the University of Arizona.
Sylvie Moulin, Associate Professor of Languages at Regis College in
Denver, holds a Ph.D. in Latin American studies, an M.A. in Comparative
Literature, and a B.A. in English from the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne.
Her research focuses on Spanish-American literature and literature and
civilization of the American Southwest; she is writing a book on Luci
Tapahonso.
91
James W. Parins is director of American Native Press Archives and
Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His most
recent work is John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (U of Nebraska P,
1991).
Jarold Ramsey, born and educated in the Northwest, is Professor of
English at the University of Rochester. His work includes Coyote Was
Going There (1977), Reading the Fire: Traditional Literatures of the Far
West (1984), and four books of poetry, including Hand Shadows (Quarterly
Review Poetry Prize, 1989). He is currently a member of the MLA
Committee on the Literatures and Languages of America.
Carter Revard, born in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, was given his Osage Indian
name in 1952. He teaches at Washington University, St. Louis.
Julian Rice teaches in the Depatment of English at Florida Atlantic
University. He is the author of Lakota Storytelling: Black Elk, Ella
Deloria, and Frank Fools Crow (New York: Peter Lang, 1989) and Black
Elk’s Story: Distinguishing its Lakota Purpose (Albuquerque: U of New
Mexico P, 1991).
Greg Sarris is an Assistant Professor of English at U.C.L.A. He has
published numerous articles and essays on American Indian literature and
cross-cultural discourse. His recent fiction will appear in the forthcoming
Paper Leaves as well as other journals and magazines.
Robert F. Sayre’s early study of American autobiography, The Examined
Self, was recently republished by the University of Wisconsin Press. He is
also the author of Thoreau and the American Indians and is editing an
anthology of American autobiographies. He teaches American Indian
Literature at the University of Iowa.
Kathryn Shanley (Assiniboine) teaches American Indian literature at the
University of Washington. She is presently completing a book on the work
of James Welch.
Rodney Simard teaches in the English Department at California State
University San Bernardino and has been active in promoting American
Indian studies throughout the CSU system. He is also general editor of the
American Indian Studies series from Peter Lang Publishing.
Ron Welburn teaches in the English Department at Western Connecticut
State University in Danbury. He is of Conoy and Cherokee descent and has
contributed to SAIL’s previous issues.
H. C. Wolfart has authored and edited numerous publications on
languages and literatures of the First Nations of Canada.
Hertha D. Wong is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
California, Berkeley where she teaches American literature, Native
American literature, and autobiography. She has published essays on
Native American autobiography and her book, Sending My Heart Back
Over the Years: Traditions and Innovations in Native American Autobiography, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
92